“Peringatan Pemblokiran” – Facebook Scam Targeting Meta Business Page Owners

PSA – A Facebook scam that tricks people with alarming messages like “Your Business Page Has Been Disabled” is taking over profiles, hijacking ad accounts, and changing usernames to “Peringatan Pemblokiran”.

(This has nothing to do with plant swapping, but it’s spreading like wildfire so I want to warn our community about it.)

The scammers send messages from accounts using official-sounding names, such as “Metα Page Support”. In the messages I have received, the “a” in “Meta” is substituted with the alpha character, “α”, making it easy to tell that it’s fake. But that’s just on my screen – some people apply custom fonts on their devices, which may make it less obvious.

Here’s an example message I received: “Hellо PlantSwap.org, Your Business Page Has Been Disabled. We are constantly updating our Meta Privacy Policy and Terms of Service We have temporarily suspended your page because someone told us that you violated our terms and conditions of service.”  

There’s usually a link to appeal the supposed “suspension”, but there’s no actual suspension at this stage – it’s just a trick to get people to engage with them and continue the scam!

Here’s the information I’ve been able to find online:

If you click on their links, it will take you to something fake that looks like Facebook, (complete with your own name and profile pic), and ask you to verify your login credentials to steal your sign-in information.

If you fell for it and submitted your login info, the scammers will immediately use that to lock you out of your personal account, and also hijack any linked ad accounts. So, if your personal account just got hacked and you have previously paid for ads on Facebook or done anything that may have allowed Facebook to save your credit card information (such as donating to fundraisers), you should probably immediately cancel those credit cards.

Once they have access to any linked ad accounts connected to your personal profile, the scammers will assign control of the ad account to another profile they control, and start running up your bill promoting their own malicious ads for selling whatever they want or spreading more scams.

To prevent you from regaining access to your personal profile, they may deliberately post content that is in violation of Facebook’s policies and get the account automatically flagged and disabled. At this point your personal account really IS disabled, which means you have no way to get back into your previously linked ad account.

Many people are posting online about this, and there’s no easy fix once your account was hacked… So please just be careful, and NEVER click on random links or enter your login info after clicking on a link.