Do you trust Facebook’s support forum for when you need help? If the answer is yes, then you need to think again as reports coming about the social networking giant states that the Help Community Forum has been overrun by scammers for months now.
Facebook developed the Help Community with an aim to let users post technical questions and get help related to account issues from fellow users around the world. But for many months now, users in return are only getting responses from bots that pretend to be the representative of Facebook and trying to scam users.
In one of the most common and mainstream examples, thousands of posts have received a reply that redirects users to a phony Facebook helpline phone number. While this puts a lot of vulnerable Facebook users at risk, there are also some serious question marks on Facebook’s ability to moderate its services. In fact, when Facebook was asked about how the platform is allowing entire categories of dangerous content to sip through the cracks, the spokesperson tried to override the issues by blaming it on the expansion of automated and human content moderation efforts on the platform.
When users face technical difficulty on Facebook, they get directed to Help Center - a portal that is based on most frequently asked questions like, "Why do ads I block continue to reappear over & over?" and, "how can I find my like pages", etc. However, when people have more complicated problems to resolve, they get invited to Help Community which is a forum-style message board to make users get help from other people on Facebook with similar questions.
On the homepage, users do find more popular questions that go by the complaints of a hacked user or queries related to search but answers are less helpful and that is where the real trouble begins as well.
Almost every popular thread has hundreds of replies from bots that are trying to redirect users to a range of phone numbers by presenting them as a helpline for the social network. This spam especially continues to grow for new threads as attackers find it as their best bet and hence try to cut out the chances of any legitimate answers as well. Moreover, some of the helpline messages are as old as five months so one can see that Facebook has been extremely inefficient in moderating its Community Help Center for months.
To catch the prey, Business Insider called one of the listed phone numbers with a claim that their account has been hacked. Their call was received by a person named “Misha” who said she works for Facebook and therefore asked all the necessary information regarding the Facebook account, including name, email address, and date of birth. But that was not all, she even asked to buy a $100 prepaid card from Walmart stating that it would expedite their attempts to fix the technical problems.
Furthermore, Misha also said that a technician would get back for more help but as the phone number was not provided, on which the technician would have contacted, one can assume that may be the technician would have been another bet to know the password of the user.
On dialing more numbers, some of them had automated spam "offer" messages, including promises of a free $100 shopping certificate with only $1.95 upfront payment, savings on car insurance, addiction services, and messages that were targeted towards people with poor eyesight. Many of the numbers also didn’t pick up.
At present, more than 35,000 people work on safety and security initiatives at Facebook and the employees include content moderation experts. It was CEO Mark Zuckerberg who also repeatedly said his company spends more on safety and security annually than the revenues which Facebook had achieved at the time of 2011 initial public offering.
Still it is coming off as great surprise that why Facebook's automated spam filters or human moderators have never spotted the comments, despite being highly repetitive. One can also pinpoint this important fact that Facebook is indeed missing out on an official phone helpline as it can resolve a lot of issues for less technically literate Facebook users, while providing them safety on the platform.
Photo: Facebook
Read next: Behind The Screens, Facebook Is Still Going For Scale Over Safety
Facebook developed the Help Community with an aim to let users post technical questions and get help related to account issues from fellow users around the world. But for many months now, users in return are only getting responses from bots that pretend to be the representative of Facebook and trying to scam users.
In one of the most common and mainstream examples, thousands of posts have received a reply that redirects users to a phony Facebook helpline phone number. While this puts a lot of vulnerable Facebook users at risk, there are also some serious question marks on Facebook’s ability to moderate its services. In fact, when Facebook was asked about how the platform is allowing entire categories of dangerous content to sip through the cracks, the spokesperson tried to override the issues by blaming it on the expansion of automated and human content moderation efforts on the platform.
When users face technical difficulty on Facebook, they get directed to Help Center - a portal that is based on most frequently asked questions like, "Why do ads I block continue to reappear over & over?" and, "how can I find my like pages", etc. However, when people have more complicated problems to resolve, they get invited to Help Community which is a forum-style message board to make users get help from other people on Facebook with similar questions.
On the homepage, users do find more popular questions that go by the complaints of a hacked user or queries related to search but answers are less helpful and that is where the real trouble begins as well.
Almost every popular thread has hundreds of replies from bots that are trying to redirect users to a range of phone numbers by presenting them as a helpline for the social network. This spam especially continues to grow for new threads as attackers find it as their best bet and hence try to cut out the chances of any legitimate answers as well. Moreover, some of the helpline messages are as old as five months so one can see that Facebook has been extremely inefficient in moderating its Community Help Center for months.
To catch the prey, Business Insider called one of the listed phone numbers with a claim that their account has been hacked. Their call was received by a person named “Misha” who said she works for Facebook and therefore asked all the necessary information regarding the Facebook account, including name, email address, and date of birth. But that was not all, she even asked to buy a $100 prepaid card from Walmart stating that it would expedite their attempts to fix the technical problems.
Furthermore, Misha also said that a technician would get back for more help but as the phone number was not provided, on which the technician would have contacted, one can assume that may be the technician would have been another bet to know the password of the user.
On dialing more numbers, some of them had automated spam "offer" messages, including promises of a free $100 shopping certificate with only $1.95 upfront payment, savings on car insurance, addiction services, and messages that were targeted towards people with poor eyesight. Many of the numbers also didn’t pick up.
At present, more than 35,000 people work on safety and security initiatives at Facebook and the employees include content moderation experts. It was CEO Mark Zuckerberg who also repeatedly said his company spends more on safety and security annually than the revenues which Facebook had achieved at the time of 2011 initial public offering.
Still it is coming off as great surprise that why Facebook's automated spam filters or human moderators have never spotted the comments, despite being highly repetitive. One can also pinpoint this important fact that Facebook is indeed missing out on an official phone helpline as it can resolve a lot of issues for less technically literate Facebook users, while providing them safety on the platform.
Photo: Facebook
Read next: Behind The Screens, Facebook Is Still Going For Scale Over Safety
