Facebook struggling to keep phishing off its platform
Advertising agencies and businesses who own Facebook pages across the world are being targeted systematically by a scam purporting to be the Chinese giant TikTok ahead of the US election.
Adverts are running across Facebook promising $3000 of 'TikTok ad credits' for signing up to use the platform as a business advertiser. With TikTok being so exciting as a platform to reach younger audiences, agencies and business users are flocking to the offer.
Once the unsuspecting individual or business owner clicks these ads they are redirected to input their details, create an account, and then prompted to download the TikTok app. In the background, the scammers are able to access the Facebook Business Admin panel of their target and send more of their adverts out, in some cases spending tens of thousands per day.
Currently, it seems unclear as to the motive or ultimate purpose of the phishing attack. The same adverts go out from account to account and therefore the perpetrators seemingly have gained access potentially to millions of business Facebook Pages and Ads Manager accounts over the last few weeks. The scam itself currently generates no money for whoever is running these adverts, it simply spends the advertising budget of its victims to spread itself like a virus.
Agency owner Simon Young of Institution.co.uk, who has more than 100 client accounts on his Facebook business manager, is one such victim. When interviewed he said "The shocking thing is that Facebook doesn't seem to be able to stop this, how can Facebook allow ads for TikTok business agency accounts onto their platform and at the same time not stop this phishing malware into their own back end systems. I've been seeing these adverts for the last three weeks and within 24 hours of clicking what I now know to be a fake advert, there were the very same adverts I'd clicked popping up on my client's accounts, attempting to spend in some instances £50,000 a day. It makes me wonder what they are trying to achieve." When asked if any clients budgets had been used, he went on to say, "Luckily I'd spotted this pretty much straight away, but the one really odd thing was that as soon as I paused all the fake adverts they then disappeared, they'd normally sit there, I was planning on screenshotting them to send to Facebook to report the matter. This is one seriously planned and sophisticated piece of malware. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that there must be bigger things in play here like the US election and the ongoing battle between Trump and Zuckerberg, or maybe the Chinese using TikTok, who knows what the hell is going on".
This is a potentially fatal blow for the Facebook advertising platform, it could lead to a complete loss of confidence in its ability to keep safe client details including personal and payment methods. At the very least it is another example of Facebook not policing their own platform and acting on reports from users to take down these types of malicious ads promptly. This follows on from the Cambridge Analytica scandal where the personal details of millions of its users were systematically harvested.
Currently, it is unclear who is behind this phishing malware and what their ultimate goal is, behind the scenes, it appears Facebook is unable to stop the activity as these adverts have been running for several weeks and have already infiltrated a percentage of its customer's advertising accounts. At the time of writing these ads were still running.
Facebook was not available for comment at the time of writing.
ENDS
Contact for interview:
simon@institution.co.uk
07879 468 819