Did someone offer you hundreds or even thousands of dollars to put ads on your Facebook page? I bet they promised to pay up front too! You just have to join their ads account through a Business Manager invite and to get started raking in easy money. And that’s when they steal your Facebook account. I get this offer every day, and if you have a Facebook page with a lot of followers, then you probably are getting it too, and that’s why you’re here.

Here’s an example of one of the Facebook ads scam offers I get every day:

Hi! We Want to Place Ads on Your Page

It starts with a simple e-mail or message, with a company offering you money upfront to advertise on your Facebook Page. They love to name drop that they have clients like Puma, Nike, and other huge companies. They say you will be able to choose the ads you want and will be paid each week or month in advance. They will also promise they don’t even need access to your page! They will send you an invite to join their ad account and you can choose and post ads from there.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Because it is.

See a few of the possibly scam offers I’ve been sent recently:

Verify Yourself with Facebook

Once you reply you are interested, the first thing they will do is send a link asking you to log in and verify yourself with Facebook so you can join their ads account. They will send a very legit looking e-mail with a link to join the ads account. It will look like the images below. The return address will be from facebookmail.com, which is a real Facebook domain for sending mail. It looks like you are simply verifying your Facebook login, but what you are really doing is granting them access to your page. And don’t worry, if you have trouble with any of the steps, they will offer to send you a video of how to do it, or even walk you through it step-by-step.

But there is one major thing wrong with this: You cannot send a request for someone to join an ads account unless you are friends with them!

So to send you a legitimate request, they would need to friend you first on the account that is admin for your Facebook Page. I responded back to one of these offers recently so I could get a couple screenshots of the request, where it looks real with logos and footers that link to Facebook.

Did you know you can also check your Facebook page at any time to see what e-mails Facebook has sent you? It is under your settings tab, in the security section. Scroll down to Security and Login. Then scroll down to where it says, “See recent e-mails from Facebook.” Click that and you can see the subject line and date it was sent. It doesn’t show you the whole e-mail, but you’ll be able to see if that message actually came from Facebook.

What Happens After You Grant Access to Your Page

Just clicking the link won’t do anything, as you can see from me clicking the link and creating the screenshots. My account is fine, because I didn’t use that link to login. But if you do actually do it, this is where you just granted them access to your own Facebook page. Next thing you might get is a message from Facebook letting you know you’ve been removed as the admin on your page. They’ll take over and change your password.

Once they’ve seized control, it’s extremely hard to recover your account. They will start publishing tons of videos and ads on your page. They may also take over your personal page as well if they have time, completely locking you out of Facebook. I know all this, because a few years ago I fell for it. You can read my story, and how I got my page back here: Somebody Stole My Facebook Page

I hope this post help save a few accounts. I tried Googling to check to see if it was scam before I accepted the offer, but this was a few years ago and it wasn’t as big as it is now. However, I recently tried finding more info and still came up empty handed so I wrote this post.

As security precaution, you should always have two-factor identification on. Facebook also has a setting where you can designate 3-5 friends to help you recover your account, but they are doing away with this feature soon. The best practice is to not fall for scams in the first place. So always remember to check to see if Facebook really sent you the message, and remember they can’t even send you a request unless you are friends first.