Facebook Scams

One of the downsides to social media is how easy it is to scam. Scamming is nothing new to us and has been happening on all forms of social media for as long as I can remember. The tricks used are always recycled but disguised as new and unknown scams and sometimes resisting the urge to click can be difficult. This paper points out all of the different kinds of scams on Facebook and guides people on how to avoid falling for them.

PC World. Aug2011, Vol. 29 Issue 8, p35-36. 2p.

"THERE'S A SUCKER born every minute." That quotation, widely attributed to P.T. Barnum, originally referred to deceptive carnival sideshow attractions, but it's just as relevant to online scams -- in particular, Facebook scams -- today.

None of the common Facebook frauds -- the "Facebook dislike button," the "stalker tracker" (which purports to tell you who's visiting your profile), and "watch this video" tricks, for instance -- are new, says Chris Boyd, senior threat researcher for UK-based GFI Software. "You'd think that people wouldn't continue to fall for them," he says. But of course, they do.

One ploy that Facebook scammers use is to encourage people to click a compelling URL. But instead of seeing the promised site, the deceived person inadvertently spams friends with links to the same URL. Some messages are so persuasive that victims may provide personal information such as credit card or phone numbers, which the scammer can then exploit to run up unauthorized charges.

The problem with most of these scams is that they make you believe that the post is relevant to you and your information, such as the age old ‘Is this you? LOL’ post. This causes problems, especially if the post is from someone you know (who has also been hacked) as this causes the post to spread to so many people in such a short space of time. This means they have succeeded in spreading a virus or dodgy website in a matter of minutes and the cycle goes on and on until people realise the damage, which in many cases is too late. This is just one of the disadvantages to Facebook and other forms of social media, do the pros outweigh the cons?

This is only one form of scamming that happens on a daily basis. There are many other forms of scamming, especially to get money out of people. I want to look further into real people scamming others on Facebook, through buying/selling pages or even posing as genuine businesses in order to scam people of their money. I also want to look into how people can deal with situations like this and if they do fall victim to a scammer, how they can go about getting their money back (if even possible).