Facebook and other social media account holders have another thing to worry about. Their Facebook groups and their account can be stolen, and then it can turn up for sale on the black market.
And the owners of accounts on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and other social media platforms can lose their groups, too. It’s totally illegal, but these groups are selling for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars, depending upon how many group members there are. Then the new owners can monetize these groups by marketing, advertising, and promoting products and services to the newly acquired members. Or worse – they can seek to gain emails and personal information from the members, so they can scam them for money or access their computers.
That’s what well-known author Gini Graham Scott discovered after her own Facebook group was stolen. As a result, after writing several previous books about scams, including The Big Con, I Was Scammed, Scam Story, and The Great Big Facebook Hack, published by American Leadership Books, she wrote a series of articles about this marketplace for buying and selling Facebook groups.
Here’s a link to the first of these articles: The Latest Scam: Sealing and Reselling Facebook Groups.
Her next article in the series will be on what to do to protect yourself from this scam.