Facebook Scams

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

One of the more common scams on FB is bogus offers and promotions where you are asked to comment on a post or share a post.

How is this beneficial to a scammer?

I know that if you actively click some links FB allows the collection of data, but I can't work out what a scammers benefits of post commenting or link sharing is.

 

[Ozzy]

I don't know this for any certainty but my belief is that it allows them to harvest Facebook users who are gullible to such scams to taregt.

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

That's what I think, but without approval to share data (e.g. click here...) I am not sure how they do it.

Not that I want to do it - I already use approved way of data collection - but it just intrigues me, as I am always commenting that these things are scams. The latest one is "win a car by commenting 'xx' "

 

[Bob Morgan]

What's Facebook?

 

[japancool]

Facebook actually doesn't allow like-and-share promotions, but many people do it anyway.

 

[Ozzy]

I am not sure how they do it.

My feeling is that they manually add you to a list of people who are vulnerable to such scams to then manually research, track, send friend requests to, maybe copy your profile and then friend your friends, and basically start phishing you and your friends.

 

[WESH.UK]

Hi Paul

All the gullible suckers who reply with whatever word they tell you to, get sent a link to click on to a fake form/page to fill in with all their details to claim their "prize".

The latest one I saw was a fake Centre Parcs page that was created in January, offering a free 1 week holiday for a family of 4, all they had to do was reply "Yes" or some daft thing like that, and this page had over 100k followers and the fake posts alone had over 150k replies and thousands upon thousands of shares.

It's crazy how many people don't check anything at all with what they are doing.

It's usually some nonsense like a £200 voucher from Lidl or a holiday from "Centre Parcs fake pages" etc; they're all scams. Notice, too, all the names of the people posting the messages on those pages too.

Sadly, Facebook does absolutely nothing at all to shut these groups and pages down. We withdrew all Facebook advertising many years ago because of Facebook's passive support for criminals when they refused to take down a stolen credit card sharing group. A more recent one was Facebook refusing to close a "How to become a scammer" group, which is still running.

Again, noting all the names of the people begging to become scammers in these groups...

We avoid using Facebook as much as physically possible now for anything non-business.
A horrible necessary evil, unfortunately.

 

[WESH.UK]

I just went to check if the Fake Centre Parcs page is still up and it is... 166k followers and 151k likes since Jan 2022...

FaceBook won't take it down... It generates activity and makes them money.

 

[WaveJumper]

And then on FB market place you get someone messaging asking if what your selling is the same product in a link they have included in their message and if it is they will be interested in buying ....... oh really. I just report them as a scam interesting enough it always seems to get followed up by FB all though a week or so later.

 

[japancool]

Why would you want a holiday to Centre Parcs?

 

[WESH.UK]

Why would you want a holiday to Centre Parcs?

lol, You sir, I raise a glass too. This made me laugh, proper giggles...

 

[WESH.UK]

And then on FB market place you get someone messaging asking if what your selling is the same product in a link they have included in their message and if it is they will be interested in buying ....... oh really. I just report them as a scam interesting enough it always seems to get followed up by FB all though a week or so later.

Erghhh, don't, I've had a few hundred of these...
I put my 737 flight sim on Marketplace... Huge mistake...

200 "Is it like this... spam link" and another 200 "What's your lowest price" or "I'll give you £20 for it..."

Facebook truly is bottom of the barrel, one of the worst. Just not sure if it's worse than Twitter? Nope, Twitter wins..

 

[WaveJumper]

Why would you want a holiday to Centre Parcs?

And if you do just make sure you take your cheque book .......... although swimming is free

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Thanks for the comments and, thinking further, it would not be difficult to create a bot that looks for the keyword responses and then sends a message to the poster for you to take further action - I think I will respond to one to see what happens!

 

[WESH.UK]

Thanks for the comments and, thinking further, it would not be difficult to create a bot that looks for the keyword responses and then sends a message to the poster for you to take further action - I think I will respond to one to see what happens!

You don't even need to respond to one to see what happens... Look at the replies people get; the scammers paste the links in the post for all to see, so you can click the link (Do it within a Secure Sandboxed Browser) and see where it goes to and view the info from there...