New Facebook Funeral Scam Targets Grieving Families

It’s not surprising that Facebook scammers constantly think of new ways to take advantage of users. However, it can be shocking just how far they’re willing to go. For example, a report in Newsweek this week highlighted a new funeral scam aimed at grieving families.

In this scam, cybercriminals send out what appears to be a livestream link of the funeral to friends and family of the deceased. To make matters worse, these scammers use real details about the deceased from actual funeral service pages. Of course, once a user clicks through, they’re prompted to enter their credit card information to view the stream. And all of this is aimed at manipulating people who are already going through a terrible time.

“Scammers often prey on people who are in vulnerable situations,” hacking expert Alex Hamerstone told Newsweek. “As terrible as it sounds, the death of a loved one can be an ideal situation for a scammer to exploit the deceased person’s friends and relatives for money.”

“People should know that funeral livestreams do not cost money,” he continued. “If you are being asked to pay for access to the livestream of a funeral, it is likely to be a scam.”

While Facebook obviously has rules against this kind of blatant scam, it’s unclear how effective the company is at detecting and removing them. In other words, users need to look out for themselves when it comes to clicking on suspicious links about their loved ones.

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