Oct 5, 2010 13:14 GMT  ·  By

The tough competition between Facebook spammers has driven some of them to begin localizing their attacks in order to target non-English speaking users.

Survey scams are the most prominent threat on Facebook at the moment and there are probably several of them running at any given time.

Some are more successful than others, depending on how sophisticated the employed social engineering tricks are and ultimately what techniques get used.

Facebook's staff has a hard time keeping up with their sheer number and by the time one page is suspended, the scammers have already set up new ones.

Meanwhile, the awareness raised by antivirus vendors, security websites, and ultimately the Facebook community itself regarding these scams is starting to pay off and users are more cautions about what they click on.

However, according to F-Secure, there are clear signs that spammers are countering this effect by translating their attacks to other languages.

One recent scam comes with a message of "Voi paska, katso miten kävi kun isä näki tyttärensä webcam-esityksen," which is Finnish for "OMG, dad catches daughter on webcam."

And this is not one of those easy-to-spot tricks where users are asked to manually "Like" and "Share" the page in order to see the intriguing content.

This is a fully translated variant a clickjacking-based attack, in which users end up spamming their friends without their knowledge by clicking on innocent-looking buttons.

The scam features well designed pop-ups that appear to be part of Facebook's own platform and uses powerful social engineering.

The end game is to direct people to a mobile phone promotion, which silently tries to subscribe them to a 19€/month SMS service.

Unlike most scams this one actually displays a video to the victims at the end, but this is done to distract their attention from what really happened.