Warning out vs. 'Faceboourk' phishing scam

Facebook users were warned this week against a new "convincing" scam that pretends to be a verification page for the popular social network.

 

Australian researcher Troy Hunt said the scam starts with a shortened link to a supposed meme, Gangnam Style parody or video, but links to faceboourk.com instead of facebook.com.

 

Victims are fooled into giving away their online credentials, including credit card data, to the fake site before they are redirected to the real Facebook site.

 

"There’s nothing really unusual about a scam of this type, but this one is particularly well constructed. No grammatical errors, no prevalence of uppercase 'shouting' or excessive exclamation marks, in fact none of the tell-tale phishing signs I’ve written about in the past," he said in a blog post.

 

He said the only sign of a scam is the URL: faceboourk.com, which as of Jan. 7 has been parked.

 

Also, he noted that while Google's Chrome browser would have warned users about the phishing page, other browsers may not have been able to give a similar warning.

 

But Hunt said that even if faceboourk.com is taken down, scammers may build on this new "convincing" scam and use similar misleading URLs.

 

"Of course there are also a huge number of potential variations on the domain name so even if this one got taken down, there’s nothing to stop a scammer from using facebooejk.com (that one’s available) or something like facceebookk.com (also available). And of course there are all those other top level domains like .biz or country level domains like .com.au," he said.

 

Hunt advised Facebook users to "carefully read the domain in the browser address bar and if it’s not facebook.com or a subdomain such as secure.facebook.com, avoid it."

 

Also, he noted the real Facebook uses SSL on the logon page "so you should be able to verify the authenticity of the site by clicking on the padlock in the address bar." — TJD, GMA News