Beware of a message where a scammer disguised as your friend asks for your phone number and sends you a notification about participating in a contest.
Facebook, owned by Meta, is a social media service used by many. SKRYPKO IEVGEN
The Cybersecurity Center warns in his weekly review of Facebook account hacks. In Facebook account hacks, your friend can approach you with a message asking for your phone number.
In reality, it’s not your friend, but a scammer who has hijacked your friend’s account.
You can identify a hijacking attempt by the fact that after sharing the phone number, your friend says that he participated in the competition. After this, your friend has imaginary won something, and asks you to share the number code you received on the phone in order to claim the win.
Example of a scam message. Screenshot from the website of the Cyber Security Center. Traficom Cybersecurity Center
The number code is related to logging into Facebook. With the help of the code, the fraudster can hijack your account and change the account information so that you can no longer log into the service without Facebook’s help.
Verify the suspicious message by other means
From the hijacked accounts, criminals get hold of personal data, IDs and passwords. Hijacked accounts are used to log into other services and to send new scam messages.
The Cybersecurity Center recommends that after receiving a suspicious message, you verify the matter through something other than Facebook’s Messenger messaging application. In addition, you should use different passwords for different services.
Facebook is a social media service owned by Meta. You can find instructions for checking suspected account hijacking from here.