You have a business page on Facebook, and you may have paid Meta to advertise. Or you might have a perfectly innocent, obscure fan page that you are not advertising. Suddenly, you get a message via Messenger stating that you are in violation of copyright or trademark rights or have committed brand impersonation (and in some versions you have committed hate speech, though this is less common), and you have to click on this link and request a review within 12/24 hours or your page will be shut down/deleted!

Of course, you click on the link, you’ll be prompted to type in your username and password. It will seem to be wrong, but you may be eventually redirected back to Facebook.

This is the Meta Copyright Infraction scam, or more accurately the Facebook Copyright Infraction scam, and it almost entirely targets businesses with the occasional non-commercial pages being targeted.

Needless to say, there was no actual copyright infringement/trademark violation/brand impersonation, and you have now given your username and password to a scammer. This account takeover is in some ways different than the others covered here before as while it is an account takeover, usually this isn’t to scam your contacts. It’s to get a hold of anything they can use that you’ve put onto the platform.

How to protect yourself
Like many other entities, Meta/Facebook does not send you a message about a violation and advise you that you have x amount of hours to click the link. If there’s an issue, Meta nukes the page. Then you can go and try to convince them to restore it. They also don’t contact randomly in Messenger - they send a notification, or an email with no links in it.

In addition, Meta would never have you go to a random site that isn’t owned by Meta. Always check the link that you’re supposed to go to; if it’s anything but facebook or meta, it’s not them.

(And of course if you see a random “kindly” where it doesn’t make sense, run.)