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Investigatation of Fake Augusta, Maine, Police Facebook Page Underway

According to Deputy Chief Jared Mills, the page, closely resembling the original, is posting disturbing fake news.

(TNS) -- AUGUSTA, Maine — Someone created a phony Facebook page for the Augusta Police Department that looks like the original and is posting some disturbing fake news, according to Deputy Chief Jared Mills.

The same fake news story is popping up on spoofed, or copied, Facebook pages of other police departments from Maine to California, including in Skowhegan earlier this month and in Moreno Valley, California, earlier this week. Some experts think the culprits may be phishing to get personal information from the curious clicking on the sites.

“This person(s) has posted several false stories to include three children being killed by their mother along with a family of 5 killed in a car accident from Augusta,” Mills said in a Thursday morning email. “These stories [are] FALSE and Detective [Chris] Blodgett is investigating this situation.”

Mills warned readers not to open the stories posted on the fake Facebook pages, which might expose their personal information to phishing scammers.

“That is one of our concerns in regards to this,” the deputy chief said. “That [is] part of our investigation.”

Police departments and people can become victims of phony pages because “it’s easy to create a Facebook Page and put up whatever you want,” Sgt. Kyle Willette of the Maine State Police computer crime unit said Thursday, mentioning that creating such a page is against Facebook policy.

The sensational story about the mother killing her children may be an example of a devious form of “clickbait,” the sergeant said.

“It may be a way to install malware” software that can damage or disable computer systems, Willette said. “Be wary, be vigilant. If there is news that is very unbelievable, and the regular media are not reporting it, it’s probably not true. There are a lot of stories that go out on Facebook that are not true.”

The first post on the fake Augusta Facebook page was made on Dec. 10. The bogus page has many of the same images, but is listed as a community page and only has 101 likes, as of Thursday morning, compared to the legitimate page, which is listed as a government page and has 11,147 followers.

“We asked that our media partners help us spread the word that our Facebook page has been ‘spoofed’ and the result is false information being disseminated to the public,” Mills said. “The spoofed page looks almost identical to our legitimate page but has several less postings, likes, and activity.”

A similar incident occurred earlier this month with the Skowhegan Police Department when the same mother-kills-children story was posted on a spoofed department Facebook page, but that fake story listed a Skowhegan address, Mills said.

The same story is posted on the fake California police department Facebook page, and was discovered on Sunday, Dec. 11, according to the Press Enterprise.

“Until we can have the page removed, we are hoping that by communicating this information to the public [we] will help reduce the amount of false information being disseminated,” the Augusta deputy chief said Thursday.

Bangor Police Department officials decided to have Facebook verify their site, adding another level of security for readers. That verification of the site’s authenticity is marked by a checkmark next to the name of the department.

“Our page has the blue checkmark, indicating that Facebook has verified our page’s authenticity,” Sgt. Tim Cotton said in a Thursday email. “There is a process to make this happen and that would need to be discussed with Facebook security.

The real Augusta and Skowhegan police department sites have not been verified by Facebook.

The verification process does not prevent spoofing, Cotton said.

“That does not make it impossible to create a page that looks like ours [but] It would not be a verified page,” Cotton said.

©2016 the Bangor Daily News (Bangor, Maine) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.