SCAM ON FACEBOOK

Facebook has modified the method people do a lot of things on the internet. For eg. We probably think on clicking the like button on anything our friends post on the Facebook, even if it is just to acknowledge that we have seen it. The scammers are taking a lot of advantage of this reflex for a dangerous scam known as like-farming.

Like-farming is termed as when the scammers post an attention grabbing story on the Facebook for an express purpose of cultivating the likes & shares. It is based on the way the Facebook works, more are the number of likes & shares that a post has, more likely it is to show up in the people’s news feeds. It provides the scammer much more eyeballs for the posts which send people to the malicious downloads and trick them into offering the information. The big question is why the Facebook is not stopping these posts before they get bigger and this is where the real
scam comes in.

The scammers have discovered a simple method to fly under the radar during early phases of the operation. The story that they originally post to the Facebook has nothing threatening about it. It is just a general story which anyone can post. In fact, if we look back through our history of the liked posts we may find some of these have transformed to something that we would not have liked in the million years.

So what are the kinds of stories that the scammers start with to trick people into liking & sharing the post. One popular kind of a story is an emotional one. We have definitely seen the posts which view rescue animals & ask you to like if you think that they are cute or it is a kind of a medical story that we are told to like that the person was cured or to let them know they still look good after surgery.

Basically a post which asks us to like it for an emotional reason unless and until we know the person who made that original post is very probably like a like-farming post. The best way to prevent the like farming is to be very judicious about what we like & share on the Facebook. Take a look at from where that post is coming from whether it is from someone that we donot recognize or it can be a friend of a friend or it can be a complete stranger.