Scams and Facebook go together like love and marriage, eggs and bacon, and Tango and Cash.
There are plenty of scammers out there on the world’s most popular social network, trying to dupe you into clicking on a suspicious link or share a page with your friends.
Here is one of the latest, posing as a promotion for British Airways.
The scam page claims that British Airways is giving away free flights for an entire year. All you have to do – the page claims – is share the photo, like the page and leave a comment.
We at British Airways have decided to giveaway FREE flights for an entire year to 649 of our lucky fans to celebrate serving One Hundred Million passengers! To enter for your chance to win simply follow the rules below!
You Must Complete The Following:
1. SHARE this photo!
2. Like This Page
3. Comment Thank You.Winners will be contacted on September 9, 2015!
Good Luck,
What are the scammers hoping to gain from getting as many people as possible to connect with their bogus page? Well, once they’ve tricked you into liking their page, they can use it as an avenue for bombarding you with other unwanted and spammy promotions, and potentially dodgy links that could lead to a malware infection or your account being phished.
Real friends don’t share fraudulent pages like this with their Facebook buddies. And don’t forget – no-one is going to receive free flights for a year. I can’t say this clearly enough – it is a scam.
At the time of writing Facebook’s security team hasn’t shut down this particular scam page. But even if they did, there will no doubt be dozens of others popping up elsewhere on the social network, waiting for an unsuspecting user to be similarly fooled.
If you are on Facebook, and want to be kept updated with news about security and privacy risks, and tips on how to protect yourself online, join the Graham Cluley Security News Facebook page.
"Real friends don't share fraudulent pages like this with their Facebook buddies."
How's this for modern heresy: Real friends don't let other friends use Facebook.
Not a popular notion, that, but then again what is right is very often not popular. The truth is that, from a certain perspective, Facebook itself is a scam. It’s not free. The cost of admission is your personal information, which Facebook turns into cash at the cost of your privacy and security.
The clue is the so-called privacy settings, which are all opt-out. Facebook changes their policies to deliberately undermine your privacy and extract as much information as possible about you and others who are in any way linked to you (even indirectly).
In other words, the settings you make today will be invalidated by Facebook’s “Move fast and break things” motto tomorrow. They don’t tell you that in their Terms of Service agreement. Scam.
You have no control in a relationship wherein one party can change the terms of interaction without notification, and without your explicit agreement. That’s what Facebook’s opt-out policy really means.
And when the responsibility of knowing what those changes entail or even that they have occurred is all on you, you’ve bought yourself a full-time job sorting them out and opting out of those that aren’t in the best interests of your privacy and security. That’s hardly “free”.
That’s the scammiest part of all. Facebook loves to hype the image that they care about your privacy and security. But the proof that they don’t is their opt-out policy. Without opt-in, it’s a scam.
Very similar to the Virgin scam you reported on a few weeks back, Graham. Any indications that the two might be related?
Hey Graham,
a new link has appeared on Facebook, for the same hoax : http://www.lovvinggtheair.com/?FlDaxNE
The picture on Facebook is exactly the same, except that it is supposed to be "First Class Ticket To Anywhere In The World".
You can check it out if you want-
Regards,
Mat
On facebook you can pay for freinds and likes and this is just what scammer are doing to make people trust them and i was ripped off by tthe Peachy Lemon scam and lost £30 to scammers