Cybercriminals only need a small percentage of people to click on the wrong ad."įacebook said that it takes measures to prevent these kinds of hacks and also keeps a close watch for any ads that lead to malware. "There's a lot of people on Facebook, and they're often interacting with it quite mindlessly. "This is, and has been growing to be, an even more viable opportunity for fraudsters and cybercriminals," said Emily Wilson, vice president of research for data protection service provider Terbium Labs.
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They're essentially using free money from stolen Facebook accounts to then commit credit card fraud.Īnother blogger described how hackers took over his Facebook account and started running ads at £1,200 (about $1,550) per day, and how he didn't get an alert until PayPal notified him about the transaction. In July, Digital Trends detailed several cases in which Facebook's customer support failed to help people whose ad accounts had been taken over. Some ad account owners affected by these hacks have found little help from Facebook and have complained that the tech giant isn't doing much to prevent these attacks. It's led to a lot of headaches for the victims. The more than 2.45 billion people who log on to Facebook each month make an attractive target for ads with malicious links, and utilizing someone's ad account has become an increasingly popular way for an online criminal to bankroll the scam for free. Lau isn't the only person with growing frustrations over Facebook's handling of fraudulent ads. He said he "freaked out" once he saw what hackers were trying to charge on his account - and then he grew angry at how the fraud was allowed to play out under his name. "It could have been days before I found out." "Had my credit card not been expired, they would have run the ads for $10,000 or more," Lau said. Facebook shut it down because his credit card had expired, and he wasn't able to pay for the ads. Lau, who hadn't taken out any Facebook ads in two years, had no idea his credit card racked up thousands of dollars in charges until he got an alert that the ad campaign was shut down - six hours later.īut Facebook didn't stop the campaign because it was pushed by hackers, Lau said. PT, Facebook had approved a widespread advertising campaign with a budget of $10,000 per day to promote a 13-second video in the US, Mexico and Australia. 15, hackers quietly took control of the ads manager page for his Facebook account. “Was it malicious? I don’t know, I can’t say,” she said.Hackers are targeting ad accounts and using victims' money to promote scam posts.Īs Henry Lau slept on Oct. Speaking to the Washington Post, Courtney Nash, senior research analyst at security company Verica, said it was unlikely Facebook was affected by an external hack but that it would be difficult to say without confirmation from Facebook. Thee problem is more likely to be related to Facebook’s server computers, security experts said, which were not letting people connect to its sites like Instagram and WhatsApp. This latest outage is unlikely to be work of cyberattackers because a hack does not affect so many apps at once, the paper quoted two Facebook employees as saying. In March 2019, Facebook and Instagram were disrupted for more than 14 hours. Technology outages are not uncommon but for it to happen to so many apps from the world’s largest social media company at the same time was highly unusual, the New York Times reports. The outage started at about 4pm UK time, with Downdetector receiving 75,600 reports relating to WhatsApp and a peak of 58,000 reports relating to Facebook and 30,800 reports relating to Instagram.Ī total of 43% of users experienced issues with the app, with 27% being unable to send messages.