Facebook has been working to create a lot of opportunities for small businesses along with trying to make it so that the social media platform would be able to provide a number of grants to small businesses all of which would help to reverse some of the immense damage that has been caused because of the fact that the coronavirus pandemic has brought the world’s economy to a stand still and as a result of the fact that this is the case a number of small businesses are starting to suffer quite a bit.
These grants have been great for helping small businesses out, but according to Kaspersky, they have also lead to a pretty serious phishing scam occurring which uses the grant as a way to trick people. The bad actors that are doing this are creating a link to a fake article that is saying that Facebook is granting money to people affected by the pandemic, and the link makes it seem like it’s some kind of a CNBC article which is a legitimate news source after all. CNBC actually did publish an article about Facebook’s plans to give grants to small businesses, and since we live in a global culture where people often end up not really reading full articles apart from the headlines this probably helped to trick quite a few people out there.
Anyone would be interested in the idea of getting a bit of money to help them through hard times, and since the phishing attack creators are using this to steal people’s credentials such as copies of their ID cards and things like that it is a pretty serious matter that should be addressed. The scam is particularly dangerous in that it uses messaging platforms such as WhatsApp to spread further by encouraging people to share the message with everyone on their contact list.
Read next: Facebook Just Officially Integrated Instagram Messaging With Messenger
These grants have been great for helping small businesses out, but according to Kaspersky, they have also lead to a pretty serious phishing scam occurring which uses the grant as a way to trick people. The bad actors that are doing this are creating a link to a fake article that is saying that Facebook is granting money to people affected by the pandemic, and the link makes it seem like it’s some kind of a CNBC article which is a legitimate news source after all. CNBC actually did publish an article about Facebook’s plans to give grants to small businesses, and since we live in a global culture where people often end up not really reading full articles apart from the headlines this probably helped to trick quite a few people out there.
Anyone would be interested in the idea of getting a bit of money to help them through hard times, and since the phishing attack creators are using this to steal people’s credentials such as copies of their ID cards and things like that it is a pretty serious matter that should be addressed. The scam is particularly dangerous in that it uses messaging platforms such as WhatsApp to spread further by encouraging people to share the message with everyone on their contact list.
Read next: Facebook Just Officially Integrated Instagram Messaging With Messenger
