New, but I bring an alert

By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics and access other forums reserved for members. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today by clicking here.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 6

Scammers are targeting Facebook with a method I have not seen before.

This arrived in my Facebook inbox, from an email address instead of another Facebook account. Not sure if anyone here has already encountered this, but just thought I'd let you know.

I have already been in contact and helped them track down and block the associated IP from Microsoft services (including the Hotmail account and a few others associated with the IP they were using as the 'drop'). I was actually quite impressed with the rapid response Microsoft made to my report to them, it took less than half an hour and a few emails with a guy named Lewis.

So, yeah, for those of you who aren't aware, this is happening. Also... I didn't realise there was a whole club for baiting!! I wish I'd saved some of my stuff, now, so I could share it with you. Hope you don't mind if I join the community?

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 May 2007 Posts: 18313

martolives wrote:

Hope you don't mind if I join the community?

We don't mind at all! Welcome. Very Happy

Thanks for the info about scammers spamming Facebook. I wonder if Facebook has measures in place to try to curb it.

You can apparently send emails to Facebook users, which I wasn't aware of. http://www.ehow.com/how_8404321_send-email-facebook-nonfacebook-account.html

Quote:

In February 2011, Facebook began rolling out its new messaging suite, which archives private messages alongside chat and text messages within your inbox. Additionally, each user receives an "@facebook.com" email address that corresponds to the Facebook user name he chose for his profile. You can email a user at his Facebook email address to send a message to his Facebook inbox, even if you don't use Facebook.

Quote:

1

Find your friend's Facebook screen name if you don't know it already. Visit his Facebook profile, highlight the word or phrase that appears after "facebook.com," right-click on it and click "Copy." If a string of number appears after his profile, he hasn't selected a user name and won't have a Facebook email account.
2

Paste the screen name into the "To" field of a new email message. Input "@facebook.com" after it -- this comprises your friend's Facebook email address.
3

Give your email a subject and write the body of your email message. Avoid using HTML -- the Facebook inbox can't process HTML code. Send your email message.

Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2013 8:02 pm

Welcome to eater, marto!

I haven't heard of scam formats like this being posted on Facebook but then I don't use Facebook so what the hell do I know? Anyway, scammers posting crap like this on Facebook may be a fairly new technique but this is a common email scam format.

Hope you stick around and join the party. Very Happy

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 6

Thanks for the warm welcome, guys. Yeah, I'm familiar with the format, but I was a little stunned by the approach, hence why I simply reported the emails (there was a Yahoo one it was sent from as well, which you can see on Facebook by hovering your cursor over the small envelope on the far right of the top of the message, near where the 'x' is to 'archive' the message). The problem is here, there's no option provided to report the message or block the sender, and there appears to be no way to access the email's headers. I spent hours trawling through page source to try to find something. Nada.

There is, however, a way to block them being sent. At the top of Facebook TL there is a little cog wheel that gives you access to your settings. You click that, and select 'Privacy Settings'. There, you'll be treated to a section that says 'Who can see my stuff' and 'Who can look me up'.

Unfortunately, when Facebook does an update, everyone's privacy settings appear to revert to 'Everyone' by default, and I'm mildldy ashamed as a supposed 'tech expert' that I didn't notice this sooner. If you go here and change that to just 'Friends' it should prevent randoms from PM'ing you on Facebook from any email address you aren't already familiar with (such as those listed on Friends Facebook infos).

It also appears possible to input individual emails straight into the field given on your 'Blocking' options. I would not recommend anyone scambaits on Facebook with a personal account, or make multiple accounts because Facebook can ban all your accounts for breaching TOS.

However, I wonder if it's possible to do it with a Fan Page or the like?

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 May 2007 Posts: 18313

I was surprised by the method of delivery as well, since I wasn't aware that you could send emails to facebook accounts. Thanks for the tips on not receiving scams via Facebook, but here we actually don't mind receiving scams. We seek them out. Laughing

A few comments to what you wrote: Please don't report scammer's email addresses. It does almost nothing to hinder the scammer. They just make another account. It does, however, hinder our efforts at our sister site, ScamWarners.com. We work to list scammer's email addresses and other info so that victims will find it. The longer a scammer uses an email address, the more chance of there being reports of it on anti fraud sites. When you get his account closed, his new one isn't listed anywhere for victims to find.

Also - we would never bait with our real life information, including Facebook accounts. Read the forum a bit and you'll find out about baiting safely, which means using all fake information to interact with scammers. For some baiters, this may include fake Facebook accounts. Wink

Sssh.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 6

I don't normally just report the email, and in this case I reported the IP it was coming from to Microsoft as well as digging up a couple of others. I'm a bit more on the tech side when it comes to these guys, because I normally deal with the guys sending malware and not so much the 419 scam. In a second message, this guy sent me a link to a site with a rogue scanner, html framers and some heaver scripting.

So, when I come across something like that, normally I upload a few of my own html framers to the same page, which essentially look like the same thing they have on the page. I don't do this if the page is owned by someone else, but in this case for example the email came from the same Berlin server that was hosting the .net site.

The website is down now because my script altered the bootloaders on their server, which means it will be down for however long it takes them to replace the server or fix the BIOS. The former would be easier. Anyway, I checked this morning, and the site is completely unavailable.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/63285962/net.png

Mod edit: Changed image to link because it was too wide for the forum. Please keep pictures to 600 pixel maximum width so they don't blow out the thread. Thanks. -Ima

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 May 2007 Posts: 18313

You sound like someone who would enjoy investigating and reporting the fake sites that scammers set up to support their scams. Please have a look at our fake sites forum.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 6

Thanks, I might just do that Smile

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 6

Sounds like it's worth checking out. This isn't the usual time of the day that I devote to things like this, though, and I have some study to do, but I'll catch up with all of you later.

EDIT: There is a reason my last was double posted. And it's got to do with why I've had a really hard time getting back into the forums.

When I tried to post the message(s) above (except just once) it wouldn't post straight away, but I thought it was just my internet connection, so I hit back and tried again. It seems it posted. As did this one, but trying to edit this one after the fact to apologise for the double post was taking a really long time. Eventually, I booted a different browser in Linux, and 'incognito' one which doesn't allow cookies, amongst other things, and it booted just fine.

So, not sure if your servers are normally like this, but if they're not, there are a few possibilities why the forums are struggling to load. I'm going to assume the servers are not like this normally, because last night and today, up until this point, they've been working fine. (this is why I thought it was my connection, but it can't be if it's working fine again now and the posts are indeed going live).

One possibility is that it is a particularly cookie-heavy forum. I'm sure one of your mods would be able to let me know if this is true so I can set up accordingly in the future. Another is that your site is experiencing an attack. Another is that it's trying to upload malware to me. I haven't received any warnings for the latter, so I find this unlikely, but not impossible.

This particular computer that I'm on gets infected frequently, sometimes I do it on purpose to test the functions of certain scripts I write, and has a bi-weekly Windows reformat for the fact. I run stuff like this through Linux to prevent any transmissions, but this PC is clean at the moment, 100% guaranteed, so whatever the issue is here, it's not on my end.

Anyway, apologies for the double post, that wasn't intended to happen at all.

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 May 2007 Posts: 18313

I already deleted the double post for you. Very Happy

The reason for the lag was that every night at this time our database back up happens. It lasts for just a couple of minutes and makes the forum lag. You happened to post during those exact minutes.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 6

Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon here, and we're not really thinking about "backups" at that time :p I must have opened the incognito browser right when it finished, then, because everything seems to be working fine, but it gave me the impression that it could be cookie or caching related...

Anyway, Cheers.

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 May 2007 Posts: 18313

No worries. When you have time, if you do decide to check out the fake sites forum, feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2013 8:27 am

Without involving your real Facebook account (obviously) Facebook is a great baiting platform. It has also been widely used by scammers so they are all familiar with its ins and outs. Also, welcome Smile

New, but I bring an alert	View next topic View previous topic