A few days ago, I saw a post on Threads from Kayla Lobermeier, who posts about food and cooking there under the handle @underatinroof. She said that she had been scammed into losing her Facebook page which had 450,000 followers.
The thread says that she was approached by a "popular celebrity podcast" that wanted to pay her for an interview. During the tech walkthrough for how the Facebook live stream interview will work, she was asked to do various things on her phone and computer including screen sharing and logging into one of her email accounts.
When it was over, the scammers had taken over as administrator of her Facebook account.
Now I've seen two more people with significant social media presences have reported having fallen for the same scam.
Dr. Jen Gunter is an OB/GYN and pain medicine physician who gives medical information, opinions, and advice on social media, and she was also approached by someone claiming to be from a popular podcast. By realizing something was up during the "tech walkthrough," and with help from Meta, she was able to minimize the damage to her Facebook account.
Cartoonist Nicholas Gurewitch, whose fantastic comic strip is The Perry Bible Fellowship, revealed yesterday in a comic that he too was scammed in this way. He got an email from someone claiming to be from The Tim Ferriss Show, and then followed instructions for a tech set up. He says, "I've been locked out of the PBF Facebook account for a month while monetized clickbait videos are posted constantly."
Turns out this has been going on for a while. This article from December, 2023, by Katie Malone on engadget.com, describes how Hannah Shaw, better known as the "Kitten Lady," and Hobby Bobbins, both with Facebook pages with significant followers, were scammed in the exact same way.
