A seductive message being sent to Facebook users that supposedly comes from a friend saying "look what I found" is spreading around the world.
This type of fraud, known as "phishing," comes through the social media platform Facebook's "Messenger" chat application.
Scammers are able to send suspicious messages to contacts of people whose Facebook accounts were previously compromised, either through the same or a similar scam.
Along with the text "look what I found", which is often followed by one or more emojis, comes a link, which, once clicked, takes the user to a malicious website that asks for Facebook login details in an attempt to obtain information on personal data.
The scam has been known for several years, but recently it seems to be spreading significantly.
"Messages that appear to come from a Facebook friend are more likely to result in clicks than messages sent by strangers because people may focus solely or primarily on the sender's name at first rather than the content of the message, regardless of whether it has red flags," Leslie Sikos, a cybersecurity expert from Edith Cowan University, told 7NEWS.com.au.
"There are many scams of this type, which means there is no single pattern or behavior that users can learn to avoid," he said.
"Note that if someone is tricked by a message and they click on a scam link, they still may not be a victim if they can figure out it's a scam by keeping an eye on the web page loading process, which would reveal the redirect to a malicious website," added Sikos.
The full article published on 7NEWS.com.au can be found here. here.