14 DAY TRIAL // Security researchers who analyzed recent Facebook survey scams point out that international users are clicking on spammed links in larger numbers than before.
Facebook has been invaded by spammers this year and that's mainly because social networking spam campaigns are significantly more successful than traditional email-based ones.
There's an impressive number of scams running every day on Facebook and many of those promise access to intriguing videos.
The spam messages they generate usually start with "OMG" in order to make them more appealing to users.
Researchers from Finnish security vendor F-Secure have recently set out to investigate some of them and used Facebook's search feature to locate posts that contained both OMG and links.
When they realized that many of these scams were abusing the bit.ly URL shortening service, which happens to provide statistics for the links it generates, they decided to check how successful they really are.
The bit.ly statistics include number of visitors and their countries of origin and can be viewed by anyone if the user who created the links doesn't make their timeline private. Fortunately, many spammers didn't bother with this.
The most popular scams identified by F-Secure spam analysts during their study were one about a video that 99% of Americans can't stand to watch, one about a girl who killed herself over something posted on her wall, and one about a one-year-old girl pregnant with twins.
Furthermore, the pregnant child scam was the most popular of the three. Its links registered a number of 50,377 clicks, 18,735 from US, 15,825 from Sweden and 3,481 from Belgium.
It was followed by the suicide girl scam with 27,400 total clicks, which had a distribution of 12,445 clicks in US, 8,137 in Malaysia and 2,373 in Singapore.
The unwatchable video scam registered 6,174 clicks, of which 5,145 came from US, 437 from United Kingdom and 155 from Canada.
"This is the first time that we've noticed people from such countries clicking on Facebook spam in such numbers. Typically we've seen such tabloid style spam pulling in folks from the USA/UK, or vice versa," the F-Secure researchers note.