Here’s a phishing scam that lures users with the promise of getting their “old Facebook profile” back. What that means is up for debate – maybe the scammer is harking back to a land of slightly less privacy options, or maybe he just wants you to look like a Geocities page from 1996. Either way, here it is:
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You too can convert your new Facebook profile into an old one for the low, low cost of your login details.
Here is the “Need Old Profile Back” Facebook page:
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As you can see, it’s a fairly typical “Click this…then that…then all of those” page, begging for Likes, Suggests and Invitations from other Facebook users. You don’t have to do this to see the “Profile Converter”, but lots of users will jump through the hoops anyway. Here comes the phish itself, in the form of a Google Docs Spreadsheet:
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They claim entering your Facebook login along with your name will mean your profile is converted to “an older version” in 46 hours. Why 46? Why not 48? That’s the kind of thing you could distract yourself with for at least, oh, thirty seconds before going back to complaining about things on the Internet.
It’s all academic anyway at this point, because those nice people at Google killed it shortly after we reported it to them. Sorry guys, but the changes Facebook have made aren’t going away anytime soon so you’d better get used to it and steer clear of scams like this one (a scam which, basic as it was, still picked up just over 2,000 clicks from January).
Hopefully only a small portion of those 2,000 fell for it, but you know how appealing those spinning Geocities gifs can be…
Christopher Boyd