A scam so rampant, Facebook had to issue a public warning

Oct 2, 2015 19:39 GMT  ·  By

If you'd seen it once, you'd seen it a thousand times. The Facebook scam that tells you to share a message otherwise your account will be deleted, closed, reset, etc..

The scam is so old, it's been seen on AOL in the 90s, on Microsoft and Yahoo's Messenger apps, and now, for years and years, it has popped over and over again on Facebook.

This recent Facebook scam comes to warn users that Facebook will charge £5.99 ($9.10 / €8.10) to keep allowing them to post "private" content on the network.

The scam message also says that only by copy-pasting (not sharing) the message with others would users be able to avoid being charged. Otherwise, as the scam message threatens users, their private photos and posts will become public.

Stop helping scammers do their dirty work!

Why is this so ominous to write an article about? Mainly because these messages have been going around for a while. Things like these don't spread if someone does not have a hidden interest in spreading them.

While most of us think this is harmless, there are users that fall victim to this kind of scams and end up paying the fees that one of the fraudsters asks them to.

Scammers could target them via private messages, or even via email acquired from nefarious databases of Facebook accounts bought from the Deep Web.

It only takes a few users to take the bait and provide cyber-criminals with quite the fancy revenue. Microsoft estimates that only the "Tech Support" scam will defraud Americans of $1.5 billion only in 2015.

So the revenue streams are there, and users sharing these kind of messages, even if they don't truly believe them, only go to help out the cyber-criminals' campaign, by helping them spread false rumors to more users.

Things have gotten so bad lately that Facebook's team has published a public advisory on the matter. So next time you see something like this, just do everyone a favor and ignore it.

The Scam Campaign Message