Phishing E-mails Purporting to be from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Circulating

Phishing e-mails posing as messages sent from Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook are presently circulating online while aiming at unwitting Internet users, published softpedia.com dated March 4, 2013.

Addressing recipients as Facebook users, the fake electronic mail tells the reader that following an examination of activity on his page, Facebook detected breach of its service conditions by him. Consequently, there can take place permanent suspension of his account. However, incase he thinks an error has occurred then he should validate his account via a web-link given. Then it'll become clear that his web-page didn't violate the social site's service terms. Subsequently, Facebook will examine the operations on his account following which another e-mail notification will be sent to him, the message states.

But, if anyone believes the e-mail and follows the web-link, he'll get led onto one bogus Facebook Login site crafted for looking exactly like the real Facebook site. Here, when the victim feeds his account's username and password, he'll get automatically diverted onto Facebook's "Help" page while it may get excessively late to realize he's been browsing one fraudulent website, remark analysts studying the currently spreading phishing scam.

In the meantime, the login details that the victim submits unmistakably land up with the scammers who utilize them for compromising the actual A/C of the person. Thereafter, having acquired admission into the hijacked A/C, it lets the fraudsters to utilize it for executing further spam and scam operations, pretending to be the original account-owner.

Additionally, while an account-verification fraud of this kind is familiar, it's quite persistent too. The majority assert that there's been violation of certain Facebook terms by the user so he requires validating his account for preventing it from getting deactivated. Recently, this scam appeared in two variations as they hit Facebook surfers. The first one arrived supposedly from Facebook's security members, while the second one asserted about the user being "insulting and annoying" in messages dispatched to other site members due to which his account had been deactivated. Both scams, similar to the current Zuckerberg scam, directed victims to provide personal information towards account verification.

Related article: Phishing Attacks, Growing in Sophistication

» SPAMfighter News - 3/8/2013