This Influencer Scam Will Steal and Sell Your Facebook Page
Scammers are tempting influencers with large sums of money for running ads on the side of your Facebook Page. You grant them access to your Facebook ad account. They then steal ownership of your page and sell it on a marketplace. I was fortunate to have narrowly escaped. Other influencers I have spoken to since weren’t so lucky.
On December 4 I received an email from [email protected]. That was red flag number one (not an official email address).
Red flag number two was the vagueness of the email, and the poor spelling and grammar. But this isn’t all that uncommon in the world of influencer outreach these days, so I didn’t initially think much of it.
Hey there,
we are collecting traffic for our site will only give you 1 ad in a day that you can post on the page. We will pay you $600 per ad for 24 hour and payment will be made in advance,
If you’re interested, Please response me as soon as possible. Thank you
After requesting more specifics, Morgan (and I’ll take an educated guess that this is not her real name), told me that she worked for a company called teads.com, that she represents multinational brands like Accor, Nike, and Pepsi, and that she wanted to pay me $600 per ad to run 2 ads per day on my page.
At this point, we still haven’t quite managed to specify that she’s talking about my Facebook page, but from some quick initial research, teads.com is indeed a legitimate media platform, who work with the world’s best publishers to distribute online ads to 1.5 billion people every month.
Spoiler alert: Morgan wasn’t actually from Teads.com. And while I didn’t know it at the time, I’ve since learned that she was trying to coax me into granting her advertising access, to steal my Facebook Page and sell it on a marketplace (maybe also not her real gender considering the sexually explicit material I was sent after I firmly requested she stop emailing me).
How did I uncover her end game?
As soon as I started warning other influencers, stories started flooding my inbox; of how this scam has been running for over a year now, and how it’s almost impossible to recover your page.
I also learned that this is not an isolated con artist – this is a highly organized ring which is coercing influencers across email, Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram, with some influencers being contacted once a day. Their efforts are persistent, determined, and become aggressive when you’re not playing their game.