Why so much spam to Facebook/Meta Business Accounts?
Trust me, you are not alone if you get multiple spam messages a day to your business’s Facebook and Instagram profiles. There’s a reason why business profiles get hit so hard by these fake messages. Here’s why:
Business accounts are public.
Unlike many personal social media accounts, business pages are easy for scammers to find, message, and comment on. Many people can lock down their personal social accounts, but locking down a business account can lead to a loss of leads.
Businesses are more likely to respond.
For those closest to me, they aren’t messaging me on Facebook when they need me. But for many of my clients, when customers are interested in their services, they do send them messages through Facebook or Instagram. The message center is also where businesses can see and respond to comments on posts. Because of this, scammers know there’s a much greater chance that someone will see a message or comment on a business profile.
Money is involved.
This is a big reason. The goal of most scams is to get money from the victim. Since business accounts typically run social ads and promote posts, many of these scammers can take a financial angle when messaging businesses. If someone messaged me about ad money on my personal account, I would immediately flag it as spam without much thought.
Fear and urgency work.
Whether it’s a scam through Meta/Facebook messaging or through a phone call, scammers love to use fear and urgency to get their victims to give up information that can be used to extort them.
With these spam Facebook and Instagram messages, you will see messages that include phrases like “your page will be deleted” or “verify now”, which are meant to make someone click or take action right away without thinking.
Most small businesses don’t have security practices in place or are “security-conscious.”
Many small businesses don’t have formal training or security practices in place to help employees spot the different types of scams that are targeting their business. Especially when they have other companies handle technology implementations and the setting up of social media and paid ad accounts. This creates a gap in understanding how these systems work. For example, if I see a spam message on Facebook saying a client’s ad account will be deleted for non-payment, I have the knowledge and access to immediately verify it. While a client, who has access to messages and sees the same message, may react differently.
Automation makes it cheap for scammers.
There are tons of automation tools that make it easy for scammers to blast thousands of messages to business profiles at once. There aren’t many other forms of direct communication that allow scammers to do this, and the more of them there are, the greater the chance they have of catching at least one business off guard.