Facebook Messenger s Hit by Scammers in Over 80 Countries: Report j104a

Facebook Messenger s in at least 84 countries in Europe, Asia, the MEA region, North and South America have been hit by a scam campaign, as per a new report. This “large-scale scam campaign” has been detected by digital risk protection (DRP) analysts at Group-IB, a Singapore-based threat hunting and adversary-centric cyber intelligence company. They claim that cybercriminals distributed ments promoting an alleged updated version of Facebook Messenger, and harvested s' credentials. The group says they have informed Facebook about this online fraud.

As per a Messenger update' reached 5,700,” the firm said.

In order to draw s' attention, fraudsters reportedly ed s with the names mimicking the real app — Messanger, Meseenger, Masssengar, etc. — and used Facebook Messenger's official logo as their profile picture. Group-IB says that to facilitate the moderation process in Facebook and by its scam filters, scammers used shortened links created with the help of such services as linktr.ee, bit.ly, cutt.us, cutt.ly, and rb.gy.

Furthermore, they gave s offers in the form of some non-existent features, such as the possibility of finding out who visited one's profile and seeing deleted messages. In some cases, the s were also offered to shift to Gold Messenger. Additionally, there were other ways in which the scammers blackmailed s that their s would be banned forever if they did not sign up on the fake page.

These led s to click the malicious links, and they were greeted with a fake Facebook Messenger website with a form. They were asked to enter their credentials from where they were stolen. “Scammers used such platforms as blogspot.com, sites.google.com, github.io, and godaddysites.com to fake Facebook Messenger pages,” the company said. s in countries like Canada, , , Italy, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, and the US fell victim to this scheme unknowingly leaked their personal data and had their hijacked.

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