Facebook birthday T-shirt scam steals secret mobile email addresses

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
@
@[email protected]
@gcluley

Facebook scams are getting sneakier and sneakier – with the latest attack using the lure of a free T-shirt celebrating Facebook’s birthday in an attempt to steal the secret backdoor key to your account.

The offer seems attractive enough – a webpage claiming to celebrate Facebook’s 7th birthday, saying that it has over 1.9 million official T-shirts in stock.

All you have to do is verify that you are a Facebook user, claims the following webpage. And this is where things get very sneaky.

The webpage tells you to visit Facebook Mobile, and find on that page the personalised email address that you can use to post status updates or upload photos and videos straight to your profile.

Many people are probably unaware that such a thing exists – but every Facebook user has a secret mobile email address they can use for this purpose.

The important thing, of course, is to keep it secret. Because if someone else finds it out,…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter or Mastodon to read more of the exclusive content we post.


Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

What do you think? Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.