14 DAY TRIAL // Scammers are again reusing the "see who blocked you" theme in a campaign to trick Facebook users into adding rogue apps to their profiles and participating in deceptive survey.
The new variation reported by Facecrooks started to spread this week and claims that people can see who removed them from their Facebook friend list.
"WOW! I just watched who deleted me from facebook friend list also some [expletive] had blocked and reported me on Facebook [expletive] Check who deleted reported and banned you @ http://bity.ly/[removed]," the spam messages read.
The advertised bit.ly links take users to a rogue application called "who deleted u?!" which asks for permission to access their information and post on their walls.
This app is the scam's propagation component and spams the victim's friends without their knowledge.
Ironically, this might lead to some people actually blocking and reporting them for spam, but in the end they won't get to see who those users are because this feature does not exist on Facebook.
The goal is to trick users into participating in so called surveys, which are nothing more than affiliate marketing campaigns to promote certain services or products. Scammers earn hefty commissions for every user that ends up signing up for a product trial or some other offer.
Some affiliate marketing companies don't even know their campaigns are promoted in this manner, while others are actually accomplices with the scammers and put out deceptive "surveys."
As previously mentioned, this "see who blocked you" lure has been repeatedly used in scams is part of a series of similar tricks advertising non-existent Facebook features.
Among the most common ones are the alleged "see your profile visitors" apps, which promote a functionality explicitly banned by the social network due to its privacy implications.
People affected by this scam should go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and remove the rogue app. They should also clean their wall of spam messages.