14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook scammers are targeting Indian users by promising them free cellphone balance recharges in exchange of manually spamming their friends and participating in surveys.
According to security researchers from GFI Software, the scams starts with messages posted by the victims, which read: "Oh wow!... .HURRAY!! I Just Got FREE CELLPHONE BALANCE..! Just try It Out Friends.. Thanks I Love it <3. Click here to Know. --> [link]"
The link takes users to a page advertising free credit recharges on the Airtel, Aircel, Vodafone, Idea, Reliance, BSNL, Virgin Mobile, Loop, Docomo and Tata Indicom networks.
People are asked to manually Like and Share the page, which was done by over 42,000 users at the time of writing this article.
They are also asked to post the previously mentioned message on the wall of ten different friends before being allowed to recharge their phone.
Of course, there is no free credit and complying with these requests will only lead to survey pages that earn the scammers money.
This kind of free mobile recharge scams used to be a lot more common on Orkut, Google's social network which is very popular in India and Brazil, but are now starting to invade Facebook too.
However, compared with the attacks that are commonly proliferating through Facebook, this particular scam which relies on manual spam for propagation is pretty low tech.
Most social engineering attacks of this type now rely on rogue apps that, once installed, can send spam from the user's account without their knowledge.
Sophos, which regularly tracks these scams, warned in its latest annual security report that their number has spiked during last year. The security vendor was particularly critical of Facebook for not being able to keep these scams and the app abuse under control.