14 DAY TRIAL // Security researchers from Sophos warn that a multitude of new scams exploiting people's curiosity have gone viral on Facebook and are leading users to surveys.
Some of these scams adopt themes we've seen before, but with slight variations and a bit more elaborated. One such example is that of a teacher beating his student.
"This is terrible! You need to see it to believe it I guess. That poor girl! SHOCKING!!! Teacher BEATS up STUDENT infront of class! How can this be justified?! A poor girl is humiliated in class by her teacher, and then beaten! Luckily, it was caught on a cell phone!," some of the new spam messages read.
Others are just identic to their previous runs. Here's one we wrote about before: "OMG This GIRL KILLED Herself After HER DAD Posted This ON Her WALL!"
But there are also some new ones, like "OMG!... This GUY got STABBED because he wrote this on the Internet!" or "OMG.. You won't believe what is harming nearly all Canadians! Can you believe it? 91 percent of the Canadian population considered toxic!"
As you might have noticed the vast majority of these scams use a made up shocking story to lure users in and "OMG" is almost always present in the spam messages.
People who follow the advertised end up on rogue pages which instruct them to spam their friends by liking or sharing them in order to get access to the intriguing content.
In other cases they are asked to give an application access to post from their walls, which will result in their account becoming a conduit for spam.
The end goal of these scams is to trick people to participate in surveys that try to sing them up to premium mobile services, which in return will generate revenue for the scammers.
"The problem is not insignificant, and even though Facebook is trying to shut down as many of these scams as quickly as it can, they keep popping up again and again like mushrooms," Graham Cluley, security consultant at Sophos, said.