Beware of this Facebook “Your messages will be deleted” email scam

Did you receive an email from “Facebook” recently telling you “You haven't been to Facebook for a few days, and a lot happened while you were away. Your messages will be deleted in a few days?” In fact it looks like this (this is a screenshot of the one I just received):

If you did, or if you do, DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINKS INCLUDED.

While the mail above may look like a Facebook message, and surely you don’t want your messages deleted, when you actually view the entire email, there are many things wrong with it that flag this as a phishing scam. Let me show you what I mean:

If you look at where the message actually came from (#1 in the pic above), you will see the originating email is NOT a Facebook account. In fact, they have nothing to do with Facebook at all (even though they have the “Facebook” name showing. Next, you will notice that the “View Messages” button isn’t even fully complete (white border around the blue inside).

Now, let’s assume that you missed the first two errors in the mail above and you still thought your precious messages were going to be deleted. Remember that a typical execution of these phishing scams is to take you to a website you don’t want to go to without you knowing it. As such, BEFORE YOU CLICK on any links/buttons, remember that you can hover over them and see where they are taking you. Take a look at where this button is trying to take me:

As you can see, that is NOT a link to Facebook.

So why do I call this to your attention? Well, I always get a kick out of the absolutely ridiculous email scams that come out each and every day (Like some foreign royalty member who wants me to broken their transfer of $100 Million dollars into the US and I get 1/2 if I just help them); however, because so many of you use Facebook, and many of you probably value your Facebook messages, I figured that there is a slight likelihood that some of you just might not take your typical amount of caution and might click the button, so I wanted to make sure to call this directly to your attention so that you don’t. Remember, as a rule of thumb, do NOT click blindly on anything you get in an email without doing just some quick analysis of who it is really from and where it is really taking you to. As the famous saying goes, “Let’s be careful out there.”

Have a great weekend and safe web surfing, everyone.

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Thanks again for being a reader of my blog!

Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman – Follow me on TWITTER, LinkedIn, and Facebook
Senior Sales Excellence Manager
Microsoft Corporation
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

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Comments

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2014
  Thanks for info, but it was not useful. As soon as I clicked on the link and saw that it lead to something unexpected, I realised that I was hoaxed. But now what? Your article just says what I already knew. Is my computer now infected? What can I do about it?

• Anonymous
  July 25, 2014
  thanks a lot for posting this. what if you've already clicked it, like Klavs said?

• Anonymous
  July 25, 2014
  @ Klavs/APPL - I posted this write-up to help identify the fake email shown above in order to help in the prevention of people clicking on the fake link. Since I noticed the fake links upon reading the email, I never followed the links to see exactly what the alternative site tried loading/executing on my computer; therefore, I wouldn't know the corrective steps to undo/repair those actions. As such, I cannot tell you what to do if you did follow the link and go to the alternative site they are pointing to.

• Anonymous
  August 05, 2014
  I knew it was fake as I don't use FaceBook, I have real friends It's always wise not to have the same Nick for emails and Facebook type sites If the facebook uses your email name then it would be fake