Run one ad….a PSA

This is a Public Service Announcement for any authors who run ads on Facebook or Instagram. You should know that you will start getting phishing emails within two days of the ad starting.

Following the tips I got from an editor for self promotion of books, I have been cross posting these blog entries to Facebook. I decided to promote one posting letting readers know about a discounted price for the Kindle version of A New Past: Book One.

The ad was easy to set up and run, and I saw some traction from it in terms of purchases and pages read on KindleUnlimited.

Then the spam started coming in.

I’m savvy enough to not click on random links in emails, no matter how legitimate they look, but I didn’t even have to click on a link to know this was phishing.

Firstly, the email address the note was sent from was not a Meta related domain, even though the sender display name was “Meta Pro Team”. Huge red-flag. If you are not looking at the “from” address on emails, I encourage you to start. It’s the simplest way to spot something fishy.

The subject and body of the email indicated that my ads account on Meta was in violation of their user terms. This was the second flag. When I got the first email, it arrived right after I got a not (from Meta) that my account had just processed the payment for the prior day’s promotion. If there was a problem with my ad account, the ad should have stopped running.

I then copied the link in the button embedded in the email. It was for a strange looking domain. I looked up the domain on whois.com only to discover the domain hosting the web-form was available for purchase. Strange. If the site was legitimate, it should have a been owned by Meta.

I chose to ignore the first email. I ignored the second email as well. The third time it hit my inbox, I reported the phishing attempt to Meta using the admin dashboard links in my ad account.

While nothing bad happened to me, people who are not as cautious could be scammed into providing login credentials to nefarious people. Something as sensitive as an Ad account has banking or other payment links that can be easily exploited. Hopefully, this reminder will help prevent you from falling victim to scammers.

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