Facebook Like-Farming Scams An increasing number of bogus Pages appearing on Facebook are designed to do nothing more than artificially increase their popularity by tricking users into liking them. This tactic has come to be known as like-farming. The goal of these unscrupulous like-farmers is to increase the value of Facebook Pages so that they can be sold on the black market to other scammers and/or used to market dubious products and services and distribute further scams. The more likes a Page has, the more resale and marketing value it commands. Heres how a typical like-farming scam operates. The scammers first create a new Facebook Page geared to a certain product or service such as smartphones, gaming consoles, beauty products, or theme parks. The Page may state or imply that it is an official Page endorsed by a company such as Samsung, Apple, Sony or Disneyland and include stolen graphics that depict the targeted companys products. When they have accumulated a large number of likes - perhaps 100,000 or more - the scammers can then sell the Page to unscrupulous marketers. These marketers can then re-purpose the Page to suit their needs and use its large like base to blast out spam messages promoting their products or services. Selling Facebook Pages is clearly against Facebooks Terms of Service. Nevertheless, there is a thriving underground market for established Facebook Pages and the more likes the Page has the more that it can potentially be sold for. There are even marketplace websites and forums set up specifically to buy and sell Facebook Pages. The marketplace for Pages is quite volatile and there are significant variations in listed prices. But, a Page with 100,000 Likes can sell for $1000 or more. Often, prices are calculated on a $ per K basis, i.e., the seller might set a base price of - for example - $2 per thousand likes. Like-farmers might have dozens of scam promotion Pages operating at the same time. Thus, they can make significant amounts of money out of their farming activities. Do not give the unethical people who create these pages any satisfaction. Do not like their bogus Pages. Similarly – Free Tesco vouchers etc The promise of free shopping vouchers is a common scammer ploy. Be wary of any message that claims that you have been awarded a voucher or gift card and must therefore login to an account to update details. It is always safest to log in to all of your online accounts by entering the account web address into your browsers address bar – this is an example of phishing. Beware the many online campaigns – photos of individuals allegedly committing crime most are bogus. And posts that proclaim money will be donated to a sick child for ‘likes’ etc. These, alas are simply not true and are all BOGUS
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 13:11:44 +0000
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