Facebook Marketplace Assistant Scam

Got an interesting Facebook marketplace scam the other day that I thought I would share to raise awareness.

I was selling a few things on marketplace and last Thursday morning I got a message from an account named "Marketplaces Assistant" stating that they restricted my Marketplace Account. Within the message was a nice little link for me to click on to verify my identity.. and guess what, I only had 24 hours to do this otherwise I'd lose my account. So two or three red flags here;

1) I wasn't expecting this to happen

2) A sense of urgency was been put on me

3) The account name Marketplaces Assistant didn't seem quite right

I was not going to let these muppets continue to use this particular scam so I did what anyone would do and reported the profile to Facebook. Now we know nothing will happen there even though it goes against their "community standards" that isn't worth the webspace it's written on.

Next I booted up Kali, got myself on a VPN and checked out the link they gave us in the message. Sure enough it was phishing site setup to steal Facebook users information, credentials and Facebook session if you used multifactor authentication (which of course I do).

First up I got the whois info for the domain and saw they were hiding behind Cloudflare.

I quickly filled in an abuse report to Cloudflare and seriously within a minute or two they had tagged it as reported for phishing which instantly helps to reduce people from getting scammed. Well done Cloudflare!

Cloudflare also contacted the registrar to which the domain was put on hold shortly after. I was provided with the web hosting abuse email to contact directly. Unfortunately I have not heard back from them regarding if the website was taken down or not.

Thanks to Cloudflare's prompt response, this scam was put to bed and hopefully saved some people from losing their accounts and personal information.