Curious to hear if anyone knows more about the story and feels like sharing?
Affiliate Marketers Investigated By FBI in Facebook Hack
From: http://performinsider.com/2015/05/af...facebook-hack/
According to sources, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are investigating hacks of Facebook advertising accounts and used them to promote various affiliate marketing schemes. According to one source, It seems that over tens of millions of fraudulent advertising may have been billed to various advertisers without their consent, making this possibly the biggest advertising related hack of Facebook.
The FBI and the US Attorney’s Office out of Northern California have convened a grand jury to investigate this case, and have subpoenaed at least a dozen advertiser and affiliates. The Grand Jury is scheduled to hear testimony this next week of several major affiliates and network owners, who are alleged to have known about the scheme but were not themselves involved or a target of the investigation. Several well known marketers have retained attorneys and have been told to “lay low” during these investigations.
Sources have also told PMI that those being investigated were able to use hacked email addresses from various advertisers to not only access Facebook advertising accounts illegally, but also were fool Facebook into giving them new accounts under these advertisers and apply illegally for credit.
Additionally, is also alleged that some of these accounts were then “sold” to friends and associates of the potential defendants for upwards of $20,000 each in an underground affiliate marketplace run over Skype. Another source told PMI that Agents with the FBI had “raided” an office in Houston Texas looking for information about these hacks from a business associate.
This of course raises some questions about the poor security measures taken by Facebook to protect advertising accounts. It’s easy to blame the hackers, but Facebook could face liability from displeased customers that have lost revenue as a result of the unlawful activity.
I saw the post last night before it was pulled as it stated individual names of people involved in the "alleged" hack.
Im sure PI took advice before updating their news and I would therefore recommend not posting any of the names here until they are made public.
I know Pace Latin the writer of this Article he is well known in the industry So i don't think he will write this from the top of his head with out any evidence.
but because they have modified the Article and remove the names its a bit suspicious and makes me wonder...
as "noipfraud" said and i second that "recommend not posting any of the names here until they are made public."
we will wait and see how it turns out.
FB has the best conditions for fraud activity so its quite understood this happen, not sure though how much resource the Feds will invest in this.
Well, I know it actually happened and the names as well (they are irrelevant). Just curious to hear more about what they did exactly. I know a lot of people are looking for bugs in FB/adwords all the time to get cheap or 'free' traffic, and I'm wondering if this is what happened here, or if they actually hacked agency accounts or similar.
Today was a story here in IL about some "Party" planner agency that creates shows with many famous singers that are tagging users in the posts.
you cant un-tag it as FB gives you an error that the request is currently pending, when the users tried to call the company the one who answer is a different call center company that for some reason dont want to share any details about the company.
its being sent from dozens of different FB accounts.
as i said FB has the best conditions to turn fraudsters into monsters!
Jeez that article could use some proof reading.
In any case, I can see someone hacking accounts and then using them for sales, though this surely is just an issue with banning accounts as FB has always done.
The idea of applying for credit lines by impersonating someone is where things get illegal and where FB can take pecuniary damages... as happened in the past, and its this that will get the FBI involved.
You'd be pretty stupid to apply for credit lines with accounts impersonating others and then try to get away with defrauding Facebook on that credit offered.