16 Timeline-Related Scams Found on Facebook

The controversy related to Facebook’s new feature gave crooks the opportunity to launch their malicious campaigns by attracting unsuspecting users with phony apps that allegedly disable the Timeline.

Inside Facebook found a number of 16 different scam pages, all of them promising to keep users’ privacy safe against the malicious Timeline. The scams are obviously working, so far feeding off the fear of more than 70,000 individuals who were duped into clicking the Like buttons found on the pages.

A lot of fuss was caused in the media around the Facebook Timeline and since many people have just read the article’s title, it’s enough for scam artists to record great success with their schemes.

A simple search for the timeline reveals a lot of results, some malicious and some more innocent looking.

While some of the scam pages only want a few Likes to promote other products, some of them require users to complete a number of steps, ultimately ending up on fake survey sites or other websites that serve some nasty pieces of malware.

An example discovered by ESET researchers urges the user to click on 45 Like buttons in order to activate a feature that allows them to enable or disable the Timeline whenever they want on their profiles.

After the entire process is complete, a message appears saying that within a few days the Timeline Office will analyze the request. Of course, there is no such thing as the Timeline Office.

Users are advised to avoid these phony pages, until a legitimate way of disabling the feature is made available. Currently, there are some browser tweaks that can be done to hide the Timeline, but there are no official ways of completely disabling it.

At the time of writing, the Facebook Security Page displays no warning about the fake pages and the Help Center doesn’t say anything about removing the Timeline, fact which, unfortunately, may confuse users even more.