First status scams continue to plague Facebook users

Graham Cluley
@gcluley

Since I first warned about the “1st status” survey scams spreading on Facebook earlier this month, the site’s users have continued to be hit by similar attacks.

Here are just a few of the examples we’ve seen spreading today:

Messages include:

1st fb Status by me was:

My first status was:

OMG now i can see my first status i used..

As before, clicking on the links leads to a rogue Facebook application that will post messages on your profile, thus encouraging others to click on the links?

The purpose? To get as many people as possible to take an online survey that earns the scammers money.

Oh, and they don’t ever post your real first Facebook status message. So you don’t even have that pleasure.

What’s frustrating is that Facebook could do more to warn its almost 600 million users against survey scams like…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.

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