Even after much criticism, security debacles and negative customer satisfaction reports, somehow Facebook, the world’s No1 social networking website with 500 million users, keeps on chugging along owing to it’s massive userbase, who can’t do without it. However, recently, it has come to light that many users on Facebook have found a shocking Video Scam which is basically a phishing gimmick and adds another negative tag to Facebook services.
The problem with mainstream facebook users is that they never seem to learn, and fall for these scams. The modus operandi of such phishing scams are actually quite simple: first, you’ll see an interesting link in other users’ status updates, but when you follow the link, you’ll be asked to fill up a number of surveys which are nothing more than ploys to extract your personal data.
Today, I’ve seen two very similar scams, both promising a “shocking video” to unsuspecting users. One message that appears in status updates reads “I am shocked!!! I’m NEVER texting AGAIN since I found this out. Video here: http://bit.ly/c4SDyh – Worldwide scandal!”. Infact I am also among those, who saw same message on their wall. Since I am not quit familiar with all tools of Facebook ( as Facebook kept on adding & changing tools very frequently ), I took it as my own mistake. later I found the similar complaint from other Facebook users.
If you click on the link in the message, it’ll lead you to a rogue Facebook application, which will ask you to fill in a couple of surveys before you can actually see the promised content.
Another message which is promising a shocking video where a teacher allmost killed a boy; clicking on the link in the status update will, once again, only force you to jump through hoops and hand over your personal data in the process. Graham Cluley from Sophos does a great job explaining the attack in the video below.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uFa3P0sLA4&feature=player_embedded
We would advice all of our readers not click on any such links where you are not absolute sure about genunity of the link or text. Never ever give away your password or personal information over ANY email, website or through any digital communication. If you’ve fallen for these (or similar) scams, remove the offending app(s) from your Facebook apps, and remove the related status message from your newsfeed.
it was interesting to know about facebook scummmm………