There are a lot of scams circulating within facebook. And users are falling for them. Why?
1. The freebie promise. Free galaxy s3's, iphone's, ipad's, or money.
One example is the $100 gift card starbucks promise. To good to be true. If you inspect the FB page links, none of these point to starbucks official website, but to a blogspot, www.sbcasdasd.blogspot.com. Starbucks is a big company that can afford to pay for a domain name, and will not necessarily need a free blogspot.
What the fakebookers want from you?
This is a classic way of making data base of emails, your friend contacts and other personal informations. The information they can gain depends on your engagement of the bait they put in. From there they can sell your details to legitimate or illegitimate marketing companies. And anytime soon expect your email, telephone, cellfone,or facebook page flooded with adverts or messages from companies you've never heard of or contacted before.
Who are they?
Using whois, the owner of the site starbucksvoucher.org is from Albania. See the details at http://www.whois.net/whois/starbucksvoucher.org
Similar scams.
2. Fake fund raising with liking pictures of injured or sick people.
So what's wrong with liking these photo whilst you have all the good intention to help with your like clicks? There is nothing wrong to feel and show you want to help by clicking like, but this is not what the advertisers is in their minds in the first place. This is just to lure your good intentions for their data gathering plus your personal and social information.
3. Prominent people dead, had accident or involved in a scandal. Scammer's really dig everyone's curiosity when they posted the following.
4. Rogue applications. This includes apps and browser extensions that promise users to remove timeline, enable dislike buttons, see who is viewing your profile, facebook "verification", celebrity lookalike and others.
Installing these apps and other browser extensions will only make your browser vulnerable to browser hijackers. They can change your browser's default settings like your home page or default search engine without you knowing. In other cases, the apps will create "backdoor" passages for other malwares to pass through.
5. "Do you remember this photo" message. This will lead you to a site that can infect your computer with a virus, trojan, or worm. If your antivirus program's definition is updated, it could detect that the url is a threat. They call the file name img, jpg, png, bmp or anything that make surfers think as an image file type to lure them to click. Remember that file name is different from a file type.
1. The freebie promise. Free galaxy s3's, iphone's, ipad's, or money.
One example is the $100 gift card starbucks promise. To good to be true. If you inspect the FB page links, none of these point to starbucks official website, but to a blogspot, www.sbcasdasd.blogspot.com. Starbucks is a big company that can afford to pay for a domain name, and will not necessarily need a free blogspot.
The blog is only a decoy site redirected to a different url at www.starbucksvoucher.org where you will be lured to sign in other fake offers.
What the fakebookers want from you?
This is a classic way of making data base of emails, your friend contacts and other personal informations. The information they can gain depends on your engagement of the bait they put in. From there they can sell your details to legitimate or illegitimate marketing companies. And anytime soon expect your email, telephone, cellfone,or facebook page flooded with adverts or messages from companies you've never heard of or contacted before.
Who are they?
Using whois, the owner of the site starbucksvoucher.org is from Albania. See the details at http://www.whois.net/whois/starbucksvoucher.org
Similar scams.
2. Fake fund raising with liking pictures of injured or sick people.
So what's wrong with liking these photo whilst you have all the good intention to help with your like clicks? There is nothing wrong to feel and show you want to help by clicking like, but this is not what the advertisers is in their minds in the first place. This is just to lure your good intentions for their data gathering plus your personal and social information.
3. Prominent people dead, had accident or involved in a scandal. Scammer's really dig everyone's curiosity when they posted the following.
4. Rogue applications. This includes apps and browser extensions that promise users to remove timeline, enable dislike buttons, see who is viewing your profile, facebook "verification", celebrity lookalike and others.
Installing these apps and other browser extensions will only make your browser vulnerable to browser hijackers. They can change your browser's default settings like your home page or default search engine without you knowing. In other cases, the apps will create "backdoor" passages for other malwares to pass through.
5. "Do you remember this photo" message. This will lead you to a site that can infect your computer with a virus, trojan, or worm. If your antivirus program's definition is updated, it could detect that the url is a threat. They call the file name img, jpg, png, bmp or anything that make surfers think as an image file type to lure them to click. Remember that file name is different from a file type.
There will always be a new threat in social networks and scammers are getting clever and become more innovative and will do anything to make you click a link or the like button. Be sure to update any internet security you have everyday. But remember that all of us has the best protection against this threat, our sensibility. If you see these or other similar posts, ignore it and alert facebook. Never share it.
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