Important Warning from Meta… It’s Spam.
Has your page been graced with a message like this?
"Important Warning from Meta:
Your Facebook page is scheduled for permanent deletion due to a post that infringed on our trademark rights. We have reached this decision after a thorough review and in accordance with our intellectual property protection policies.
Blah, blah, blah. Request for review: https://completelyboguslink
Blah, blah blah
Sincerely,
Facebook Support Team”
I’ve received so many of these messages over the years that I should really start counting them. Wonder what the over/under on it would be for the year???
Here’s the thing: THESE ARE FAKE!
I’ll give them this, they do a really good job on playing to the fear of your page getting deleted. Their hope is that you see “Your page will get deleted” and “Click here to resolve this” and click the link without a moments hesitation. But if you take a moment to stop and review the message a little more closely, you’ll start to notice some really interesting things. Before we can point out how to tell, we need to know why we get these spam messages.
Why do we get these messages?
Scammers set up bot accounts to blast messages to hundred of pages at once. They are attempting to steal your login information. Once they have it, they may try to hold your account for ransom, scan it for any other personal information they could sell, or clone your account and do who-knows-what with it. I tend to notice I get more messages when a page is performing better than normal but this isn’t always the case. How exactly they dial in on your page is beyond me.
So how do we know it’s fake?
There’s always going to be the what if it’s a real message and my page is going to get deleted. I see these all the time and know better but there’s still the little voice in the back of my head saying “but what it it’s real this time?” However, if you look through the message again slowly, you’ll notice a few odd things- the tell-tale signs that it’s fake.
Look at the name/profile picture
Who is the message coming from? If it looks like it’s coming from an individual person, it’s probably not Facebook. Sometimes, it’ll say Facebook Support or META. If thats the case, look at the profile picture. They’ll modify the Meta or Facebook logo to try and trick you.
Typos
Review the message slowly. Are there any obvious typos? How about really strange grammar? If you see them, it’s fake. Facebook isn’t going to send you a message with typos. You’d think these scammers would be smart enough to run their scam through a spell-checker.
Review the link
Ok, this one is a biggie. I get it, we see the link and our first instinct is to click it. If all you do is a doubletake with the link, that’s enough. Sometimes it’s painfully obvious: some weird shortlink/@verificationlogin. Oftentimes it will look like a legit Facebook link…facebook.com/support/231934uiquehq12r. If it’s a huge, complicated link with a lot of letters and numbers, it’s fake. If it looks like it’s going to take you away from Facebook, it’s fake. If you do click the link, it may look like a real Facebook login page. Don’t fall for it. Better yet- don’t click on the link.
What can we do once we get this message?
The big takeaway here: Facebook will not reach out to you like this if your page is, in fact, getting deleted. Before they delete your page, you will get restrictions put on your page. It’ll tell you when posts are removed, why they are removed, and directly let you appeal that decision. After so many of those then they’ll suspend your page. By that point, you should know it’s happening. It won’t just come out of the blue as some random chatbot message riddled with typos and weird links.
As for what to do with the message, this is completely up to you. I prefer to report it as spam and delete it right away. It’s still an incoming message so ignoring it could affect your message response rate. You could just delete the message right away or if you’re the kind of person to toy with scammers, message them back. Just don’t click the link!
Another tactic I see these scammers do is tag you in a post. Then when you click the notification, it' looks like a real thing from Facebook. Facebook will not publicly tag you in a post saying your page is a threat. Remove the tag, report it, delete it and move on.
This advice doesn’t apply to just Facebook. If you apply these same safeguards to any odd email you get, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll notice. One time I received a threatening email about unpaid taxes and upon closer inspection, realized it was being sent by a folk band located in Ireland.
Spam messages like this won’t go away. So stay smart: don’t click on links you don’t know and approach every message with caution.