14 DAY TRIAL // A new Facebook scam is tricking overly curious users into participating in rogue surveys with a video about a kid who allegedly took revenge on his former school after being expelled.
Tens of thousands of users have already fallen victim to this scam which produces spam messages like "This Kid is freaking crazy! See What this Kid did to his School after being Expelled! This is insane..."
The spammed link takes users to a rogue page hosted on an external domain, which displays an image of a kid in handcuffs being escorted by an officer to a police car.
The associated message reads: "After this 11 year old child was expelled from his school, He went Beserk!"
As usual, in order to get access to the intriguing content users are asked to perform several steps, which involve liking the page and sharing the link on their walls.
In reality there's no video and the ultimate goal of this scam is to convince people to participate in surveys for the benefit of scammers, who earn a commission from marketers for driving traffic to their campaigns.
During many of these surveys, users are also asked for their phone numbers and are automatically signed up to premium rate mobile services that charge them weekly.
"We have known for years that the cellular companies have no ethics, so they are a great payment service to use for scams," Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at antivirus vendor Sophos, warns.
The increased prevalence of such scams on Facebook is definitely worrying and the social network's security staff doesn't seem to be able to keep up with them.
"Perhaps Facebook should take more notes from Apple and have a review process before new applications can be published," the Sophos researcher suggests.
