General warning to Facebook users
March 12th, 2010 | Posted by Admin
A number of people have warned us about a new scam aimed at anyone with a Facebook account. The account-holder is sent an email which appears to come from Facebook, saying that someone has applied to be their friend. The email looks exactly the same as any Facebook email, and includes a link to what appears to be the Facebook login screen.
It is in fact a spoof website designed to capture personal information, and is known as ‘phishing’. The scam is typically used to capture bank account login information – by presenting a login screen that is an exact copy of an internet banking log-in screen.
Although there is no financial risk from someone stealing a Facebook user name and password, many of us use the same password and user name for a variety of web-sites, including online banking. So it’s important never to divulge any kind of personal information to websites, unless you know and trust them.
The easiest way to know whether the website is either a spoof or the real thing is to check the www web address. A real Facebook site will show the address as ‘www.facebook.com’. A spoof website will have an address like ‘www.facebook.anothersite.com’.
If you do think you may have been targeted, it’s easy enough to change your Facebook user-name and password. But if you use the same information for other sites – including online banking – the advice would be to change these as well.
