In 2018, the good things in life—friendship, romance, altruism—and the bad—lying, bullying, crime—all unfold in expedited, magnified fashion on social media. Earlier this year, researchers uncovered a scam to bilk you out of cyber currency on Twitter. Now, in similar fashion, we’re alerting you to the dangers of a recent crop of Facebook fakes profiles.
Social media moles
Scams are as old as humanity itself. In the 14 years of Facebook’s existence, they’ve surfaced time and time again on the popular social media network. Catfish, a documentary about a duplicitous Facebook relationship, was released eight years ago, and new episodes of the hit MTV show it inspired air to this day. In 2018, most people are very familiar with the possibility of fake Facebook users, their motives, and modus operandi. That’s why the current crop of Facebook con artists have stepped up their game.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal details how Facebook fakes pose as allies to influence and gain intelligence on grassroots political movements. Social media swindlers aren’t only targeting political organizations, but businesses as well. In corporate scamming, a catfish poses as an employee of your company (LinkedIn and “Our Team” pages make this information readily available), creates a Facebook group, and invites legitimate employees to join and dish company data. With cyber predators like these on the prowl, Facebook was forced to delete 583 million fake accounts in the first quarter of 2018 alone.
Account accountability
If yours is one of the 40 million corporations wisely using Facebook to advertise and interact with your customer base, you don’t have to wait for Facebook’s team of analysts to identify and delete fraudulent accounts. There are proactive moves you can make to protect your business.
For starters, you can and should enable secure two-factor authentication for page managers looking to post content from their mobile device. To ensure secure desktop access to Facebook, make sure that your network’s firewall is high functioning.
Facebook presents business owners with unprecedented opportunities—as well as unsettling risks. Contact eMazzanti for assistance navigating them all.
Bryan Antepara: IT Specialist
Bryan Antepara is a leader in Cloud engagements with a demonstrated history of digital transformation of business processes with the user of Microsoft Technologies powered by the team of eMazzanti Technologies engineers.
Bryan has a strong experience working with Office 365 cloud solutions, Business Process, Internet Information Services (IIS), Microsoft Office Suite, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Customer Service.
He has the ability to handle the complexity of moving data in and out of containers and cloud sessions, makes him the perfect candidate to help organizations large and small migrate to new and more efficient platforms. Bryan is a graduate of the University of South Florida and is Microsoft Certification holder.
