"Syla Pravdy" receives a phishing email about their Facebook page

The editors of the Investigative Journalism Center "Syla Pravdy" received a phishing email whose senders posed as the company Meta. Chief editor Yuriy Horbach reported this to the representative of the Institute of Mass Information in Volyn oblast.

According to him, the phishing email arrived on May 2 and was about the media outlet's Facebook page.

"The letter went to the spam folder right away, but we check it on a regular basis, so we noticed the message. It looked very believable, but the sender's domain and the website to which the letter forwarded you seemed suspicious," the editor said.

The phishing email received by "Syla Pravdy" on May 2. Screenshot provided by Yuriy Horbach

"Syla Pravdy's" journalist, graphic designer Anton Buhaychuk noted in a comment to IMI that the website to which the link in the email leads has several phishing hallmarks.

According to him, Facebook can send such notifications through the platform itself and has no need to do so by mail. In addition, the layout of the service is poorly designed and hosted on the cloud service Vercel, which offers free hosting for web applications.

“A large corporation such as Facebook (Meta) definitely has more reliable ways of posting information for users. Even without special expertise, you can see that the link to the page does not contain the words Facebook or Meta. Even though some criminals manage to bypass this aspect, in this case they didn't even try very hard," said Anton Buhaychuk.

The website to which the email pointed. Screenshot provided by Yuriy Horbach

He stressed that searching the main address of the link in the letter "https://help-center-campaign-for-business.vercel.app/" leads to a template website that is related neither to Facebook nor to any notifications.

"To an average user, this will be realize to understand that the website is phishing," concluded Anton Buhaychuk.

Ihor Rozkladay, deputy director of CEDEM (an organization that is a trusted partner of Meta), noted that although the letter had an addressee, it was not by Meta.

"I highly recommend not to open such emails on your phone, but to view them on your computer; I myself have received such letters too," he noted.

As reported earlier, scammers send out phishing emails to Facebook page administrators, asking them to follow a link to confirm they are the owners of the account. However, in this way the scammers can get hold of the page's data.