The dark side of Facebook email: phishing

facebook-logo-square-webtreatsetcFacebook’s been in the news this week with the announcement of their new messaging capabilities which will allow their users to email each other with new @facebook.com email addresses. The new features will also help surface priority messages from ‘friends’ and other people you interact with and will bring some clever capabilities that bring together messages from different sources (email, posts, SMS etc.) into one converged social inbox.

The big question is “how will this change online users’ behaviour?” Right now, it’s too early to say for sure but with over half a billion users around the globe it would be foolish to write this off as irrelevant.

For now, Facebook’s new features are in a private beta test phase, to be rolled out over the coming months. Mind you, that hasn’t stopped some enterprising, if illiterate, spammers from trying to take advantage of their newly acquired @facebook.com email addresses. Here’s what I found in my Junk Email folder earlier today:

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