The Impact of Facebook Scams and How Scammers Make Money
In the past, we reported a number of Facebook scams that were spreading like wildfire. Scam messages including “Girl Killed Herself After Dad Posted On Wall Scam”, “Marika Fruscio Spam”, “OMG Can’t Believe Justin Beiber Did This To A Girl Spam”, which were reported earlier are still spreading on Facebook. As Facebook scams continue to boom and spam news feeds, Websense, a web security firm conducted an interesting study that explains how scam messages spread and how they work.
Websense conducted their study by choosing two scams which are still very much actively spreading. The study showed that nearly 1800 Facebook users clicked and interacted with the scam every few seconds. Assuming that every user spent at least 1 minute on the scam website completing surveys, then there will be 2,592,000 hits (visitor count) per day! That’s a bomb!
Calculation: (24 hours X 60 minutes) X 1,800 users = 2,592,000 hits per day
Users are tempted to click on such scam messages that increase their curiosity. And that’s why scammers create scams with enticing titles and descriptions along with images (thumbnails) of half-naked girls.
How do scams spread?
There are two ways on how scam messages spread. One, when users click on a scam message, they will be taken to a fake page where they will be asked to verify their age by clicking on the “Jaa” button twice. The “jaa” button is coded with functions that will post the message on their Facebook wall automatically.
Second, when a user clicks on a scam message, the user will be taken to a webpage where it contains an image which appears like a normal YouTube player (Or any other video player). These sites will not have any age verification procedure. However, in this case the play button is coded, so when the user clicks on the play button, it will automatically “like” and share the scam message on their Facebook wall.
Here is the code that is used to automatically share the message in the background -
The scam the spreads across the news feed when users’ friends start clicking on the message.
No comments:
Post a Comment