Last spring, I resurrected my https://www.inoreader.com/ account to get RSS feed subscriptions for news sources. My email accounts are so over run that I’m not likely to track what’s happening local through them. So, I made a change.

Today, looking through, I noticed an article about a suspicious death and police soliciting for more information. Knowing many of the local Facebook groups are super gossipy, I searched on the victim’s name seeking for find more information.

Instead, I got what looks like a bunch of phishing in the search results. They looks like news articles, but they are fake news organizations. “6 News Mk” is just article after article with the same couple of photos of a “police line do not cross” yellow tape for different events to spam Facebook. The oldest one is from Friday and newest is from Saturday. I would bet they used AI to spew a bunch of posts at Facebook. Some kind of throttling shut down the postings, but no moderation has deleted them. Safely capturing the URL portraying as the full article, it looks like it has a payload.

There’s not really a Facebook option to report that a page is attempting to infect or compromise visitors. (I didn’t link to them because I don’t want my readers to accidentally compromise their computers.)

Also, I found a dozen different ones impersonating a news organizations doing the same for stories about this victim. There’s more of this stuff than results I’d deem legitimate.

I don’t know that staying away from the dark corners of Facebook will help. The goal of these phishing pages is to get them into the news feeds of victims. Facebook needs to do better.