It was observed that a large number of social media pages operating on Facebook for a lengthy period of time had recently changed their original usernames to falsely represent companies such as Google and other similar leading organizations.
Certain Facebook pages that had adopted new names had been previously verified under their original titles. These Facebook pages were also noted to have a large number of subscribers.
Additionally, it was observed that these pages were attempting to retrieve private/confidential information via various methods while it was reported that certain personal accounts were also hacked in the process.
Examples of several Facebook pages falsely representing known companies are seen below:
Similar instances were seen being shared widely across social media over the past few days and as a result, a fact-check was carried out by Hashtag Generation as follows.
In light of these incidents verified accounts and accounts with blue ticks on Facebook and other platforms have now become unreliable.
Instances where personal/confidential information were retrieved by Facebook pages that were said to have been verified are also mentioned above.
In order to further confirm that a verified page is reliable, users can explore the relevant page’s ‘about’ section and ‘Page Transparency’.
A brief explanation given by Facebook in this regard can be found here.
