Harmless prank ends in tragedy? No surprise it’s a Facebook survey scam

Graham cluley
Graham Cluley
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Sophos’s page on Facebook has thousands of members – sharing information about the latest threats. Today I’m indebted to one member, Robert, who alerted me to a new scam spreading virally across the social network.

Users are seeing updates from their online Facebook friends saying things like:

Amazing how such a harmless prank could cause something so bad! [LINK]

where the link points to a page on Facebook.

If you are tempted into clicking on the link (as many people have been) then you are taken to page urging you to give permission for a third party application to access your Facebook profile.

This is key for the scam to work. The application needs to be able to share its link virally with as many Facebook users as possible – that way, it can maximise revenue for the scammers.

You may not realise this of course. You may believe that you’re simply going to watch a video of a “harmless…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity 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 analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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