Libyan bank-fraud networks triple Facebook impersonation scams in a month

Bank impersonation scams on Facebook nearly tripled in Libya last month, according to the second report in a monthly monitoring series published by Tahaqaq, a digital fraud-tracking initiative. The report documented 308 fraudulent pages and advertising campaigns impersonating 12 Libyan banks in August, up from 107 cases in July.

The scale and pattern of the campaign point to organised networks rather than isolated fraud attempts. A single bank was impersonated in 143 of the 308 recorded cases — 46.4 per cent of the total — while several pages targeting different banks used near-identical wording. One promotional phrase appeared verbatim across more than seven pages impersonating three separate banks, evidence Tahaqaq says suggests a common source is running multiple phishing operations in parallel.

Fadia al-Daghies, who heads Tahaqaq's monitoring and documentation unit, said the growth of digital payment services in Libya has been matched by intensifying activity from fraud networks operating largely from outside the country. Citing data from Meta's ad transparency tools, she said many of the flagged pages were run from abroad — a signal she described as not conclusive on its own, but meaningful given how consistently it recurred across cases and the absence of more reliable alternative data.

"We recorded hundreds of interactions from people who appeared to trust these pages, which points to a real risk of victims," al-Daghies said. She added that fewer than half of the phone numbers linked to flagged pages this month were Libyan, and that direct contact with some of the accounts behind the scams found the people responding did not speak in a Libyan dialect — both signals, though not standalone proof, consistent with fraud run from outside the country.

Tahaqaq called on banks and regulators to coordinate a joint public-awareness push, describing it as the first line of defence against a fraud network it says continues to expand.