A scammer will reach out to a digital marketer via Facebook Messenger posing as someone looking to hire a Facebook ad campaign manager. How are these scammers gaining access to all these Facebook ad accounts? ShopBase did not immediately respond to Mashable's request for comment. In fact, the majority of the ecommerce shops involved in this particular scam ring appear to be built on the ShopBase platform. The tens of thousands of dollars a day in Facebook ads that the scammers had access to were pushing users to an online shop called "." The site is built using ShopBase, an ecommerce platform like Shopify located in San Francisco. Ī screenshot of Loni Mayse's Facebook ad manager showing the scammer's ad and the $15k per day advertising budget that they set. In another, they added a fake profile utilizing her own name, Loni Mayse, perhaps in an effort to make the duplicate look like a glitch and not an actual separate unauthorized account added to her Business Manager. In one instance, the scammers tried to spoof Facebook support by using a fake customer service email address for the user being added to the account. She explained how their emails and usernames tried to disguise what they were doing. They also changed the names of the Facebook pages. Mayse says the scammers quickly placed two unauthorized users inside her Facebook Business Manager, which is the backend portal that allows social media managers and marketers to run multiple Facebook Pages and ad accounts from one dashboard. Bypassed every single Facebook security protocol as well." " were in about 10 of my accounts within minutes," she explained in an online conversation with Mashable. "Let's be honest who the fuck wants that?" she said, referring to the product being hawked via ads on a Facebook post describing the nightmare scenario she just went through.
The fraudulent ads running on Loni Mayse's Facebook pages were pushing users to this ecommerce store.