14 DAY TRIAL // Ray-Ban sunglasses are promised by cybercrooks in return for a few clicks as part of a campaign that’s making the rounds on Facebook.
Some time has passed since we saw a classic survey scam, but fear not, as soon as they came up with a plan, fraudsters launched a Facebook campaign designed to lure users to sites that earn them a commission.
“Celebrating a whopping $2 Billion profit in 2011, Rayban has decided to giveaway free pair of Ray-Bans to facebook users!” reads a message on a page managed by Ray-Ban Giveaway.
In this particular case, the scheme is simple. A post promises a pair of free Ray-Bans to anyone who joins the Facebook page and invites a number of friends. The scammers promise one pair of sunglasses for every 50 friends invited.
The page even details the steps that must be taken to easily send out invitations to multiple contacts at a time.
The third step points victims to a compromised domain that hosts a malicious PHP which redirects users to the survey website.
Users who fall for the scam and complete the poll will never see the sunglasses and they might even end up giving the cybercriminals pieces of sensitive information which they can utilize in future campaigns.
So far, 149 users have already fallen for the scam, but even more worryingly, a number of 5,500 invitations to the page have been sent out.
The folks from Hoax Slayer also came across a variant, but the one reported by them is somewhat different, which probably means that there’s more than one version currently circulating on Facebook.
We have reported the phony profile to Facebook, but similar ones are bound to appear in the next days.
Remember never to trust advertisements that promise free items and lead to surveys or other shady looking webpages. Stop helping the scammers earn easy money!