Softpedia
 

NEWS CATEGORIES:



NEWS ARCHIVE >>
SOFTPEDIA REVIEWS >>
MEET THE EDITORS >>
Home > News > Security

August 20th, 2010, 13:16 GMT · By

Flurry of New 'OMG' Scams Plaguing Facebook

SHARE:

Adjust text size:


Numerous new scams target Facebook users
Enlarge picture
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.

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK:

5,293 hits · 3 comments · Link to this article · Print article · Send to friend · Subscribe to news

MUST-READ RELATED ARTICLES:


'Top T-Shirt Fails' Facebook Scam Employs Clickjacking

Scammers Lure Facebook Users with Fake Dislike Button

Teacher Attack Scam Spreading Virally on Facebook

'Suicide Girl' Virus Alert Spreading on Facebook is a Hoax

McDonald's-Themed Scam Spreading on Facebook

READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: Ricker on 19 Sep 2010, 00:10 UTC reply to this comment

SO HOW DO I GET RID OF IT????

Comment #1.1 by: RH on 18 Nov 2010, 22:45 GMT

Login to facebook - the go to www.facebook.com/settings and you'll have access to all your applications and what they can and can not access. Get rid of the apps that you don't recognize, they are the ones spreading these things in your good name!


Comment #2 by: RH on 18 Nov 2010, 22:44 UTC reply to this comment

The reason why its out of control is easy - Facebook makes it easy to integrate with its software. And they want to give us a new form of email? No Thank you!

Copyright © 2001-2012 Softpedia. Contact/Tip us at

WindowsGamesDriversMacLinuxScriptsMobileHandheldNews

SUBMIT PROGRAM   |   ADVERTISE   |   GET HELP   |   SEND US FEEDBACK   |   RSS FEEDS   |   UPDATE YOUR SOFTWARE   |   ROMANIAN FORUM