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Shaw Capital Management Online Tech News: Facebook Scam Warnings
Shaw Capital Management Online Tech News: Facebook Scam Warnings
While the rest of the world is enamored with the arrival of Google+ and caught up in the churning activity room that is Facebook, we’d like to at least wave a red flag of reality through a weekly scam list we put up.
Pennsylvania,
Drums,
United States of America
(prbd.net)
12/08/2011
While the rest of the world is enamored with the arrival of Google+ and caught up in the churning activity room that is Facebook, we’d like to at least wave a red flag of reality through a weekly scam list we put up.
The week started in a rather gross manner with a scam named “OMG! A Spider under the skin!”. Anyone drunk enough to click on the link after seeing the unintelligible thumbnail accompanying the post is in for something more than a scare. Instead of seeing a more detailed backstory on the claim or some sort of explanation on the photo, the user will be redirected to another page. And guess what, as a sort of test or verification, they require you to fill up a survey form first.
A particularly nasty one is a video of a fan who died at a baseball game. That’s because the story really happened and referring to it in such a manner seems very unethical. It was about a fan who fell to his death trying to catch a baseball in a particular game. Scammers trying to take advantage of such a situation can only be regarded as dangerously single-minded.
And because these scammers are easy to catch on, with the soft launch of Google+ came the pretentious invites for a privileged access to the popular social networking site. People are practically clamoring for Google+ invites; and upon seeing the profitable market, scammers jumped in the scene. End result: personal information ending in the hands of the wrong guys.
Shaw Capital Management Online is also keen on issuing a scam warning on the very tempting “1000 free Facebook credits” scheme. A message making the rounds in the Facebook-verse (or simply self-propagating virus), entices users by promising a thousand credits. It just calls a URL to be manually pasted on the address bar, which effectively draws you out of the Facebook fence and into the den of the scammers where your details could be compromised.
Most of the scams in Facebook are actually common survey nuisances which the perpetrators propagate in hopes of collecting money or other perks when they hit a certain threshold. One such scam calls attention for the users to click it by putting a “Who had blocked you?” title. For the curious Facebook users, this could potentially spell data compromise as the scammer plays on the curiosity nerve of people.
Seeing it in your friend’s wall doesn’t mean you have to lower your guard. Actually, the reason most of the scams in social networking sites have such a great exposure is that once a user clicked the malicious link, his profile will automatically display a copy of the same scam (which is, in a way, like signalling to his friends it’s legit or something). Living in the Information Age, possessing the right information is something that can save you from dealing with lots of troubles.
Hopefully, we’ve warned and informed you enough to take action and click those Report Page as Scam links in Facebook instead of the interesting links.
About
Shaw Capital Management Online was born from a rather unfavorable school project addressing the “How do you make a website user-friendly?” issue. Apparently, we have an uncanny knack in making something unlikable into something, er, more likable. We never really knew it’d be this big, but hey, why not make it official? So we launched SCM Online where we can share, not just the most popular, but the most interesting pieces of news at any given time.
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