The top 5 Facebook scams of 2015
Despite the efforts of many, a number of scams have still been running riot across Facebook throughout 2015.
And whilst most of them exploit ‘tried-and-tested’ techniques of yore, some come with slightly new twists. We outline the 5 most popular scams (we’re not including rumours or hoaxes) that we have had reported to us in 2015 so far.
Free cars & airline tickets
Fraudulent Facebook giveaways have been perhaps one of – if not the most – popular scams you’d likely encounter on Facebook, with fake “share to enter” posts going viral across the social media platform each and every day.
Thee fake giveaways have been a firm favourite of social media scammers for a number of years now, and over those years the scammers have posed as plenty of different entities. And despite things like Apple goodies or supermarket vouchers being popularly used as bait over the last few years or so, the 2015 variants have often used either cars or airlines to lure potential victims.
Dodge Chargers, Chevrolet Camaros, Range Rovers and Mercedes Benz cars have all been prolifically “offered” for liking and sharing a post, and free Virgin, South West Airlines and Qantas tickets have all been used as bait a number of times to fool victims.
Nearly all of these scams resulted in attempts to direct potential victims to external webpages where they were tricked into parting with their personal information to “complete the offer” when the reality was they were giving away their information to spammy marketing companies who would then duly bombard them with more spam.
Sharing and liking posts and/or pages is a popular modus operandi for scammers on Facebook. You can learn more about Facebook competition scams here.
Your account has been suspended by Facebook Security
We’ve seen yet another rise of phishing attacks in 2015 aimed squarely at Facebook users that threaten potential victims with account suspension/deletion in order to panic them into complying with their demands.
This is most popularly orchestrated by the scammer compromising a Facebook account of a user and changing the name and profile picture to create the illusion that the compromised Facebook account belongs to “Facebook Security”.
Upon doing so, the scammer sends out chat messages to all of the contacts who are friends with the compromised account. The chat messages tell each friend that their accounts have been suspended, or have violated Facebook’s terms and conditions, as well as provides a link where the friend can sort out the issue.
Of course the threats are bogus, but the recipient doesn’t necessarily know that. If they click the link and enter their details in the ensuing spoof webpage, there is a good chance the phishing scammer could gain control of their Facebook accounts as well.
These scams are not always initiated through chat messages though, be aware of emails to the same effect.
We discuss this threat in more detail here.
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Facebook Lottery
This popular scam is as prolific as ever and scammers are now combining this popular “advance fee” scam with phishing techniques to increase their success rates.
Advance fee scams are where scammers tell the victim they have won or are due a large sum of money, but the victim has to send an advance payment first in order to receive it. Needless to say, Lottery Scams use a lottery winning as bait.
And scammers are using phishing attacks to help fool victims. The attacks are similar to the one we outlined above, where a scammer compromises an account and uses that account to send messages to users on the friends list that tell the friends how to “claim their prize”.
Malware that automates chat messages can also be used to send messages, or the scam can be started by an unexpected friend request or even an email.
There is no Facebook Lottery, so it doesn’t really matter how you hear about your supposed winnings, it’s not real.
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