Clicking on a Facebook Scam to See What Would Happen

https://dev.to/_theycallmetoni/i-clicked-on-a-facebook-scam-to-see-what-would-happen

by bhalp1 • 9 years ago

25 12 9 years ago

Apocryphon• 9 years ago

Is this a regular thing, to see phishing or malware scams in Facebook ads?

mcintyre19942• 9 years ago

Yep, but you'll probably never see them. I never see them but I always see them on my mum's Facebook whenever I'm home. My guess is there's two main factors:

1) Abusing Facebook targeting to proxy for 'non-technical' in some way.

2) Presumably if you click Facebook ads you get more similar ones, for some criteria. So if you got them you wouldn't click, and they'd disappear.

Facebook are terrible at policing this - I'd guess >50% of the stuff they're paid to show my mum is a blatant scam - if somebody spent 10 seconds looking at each ad I've seen there before accepting it they'd spot all of them. I've basically tried to show my mum how to identify something that will take her outside of the app (not that easy on the Android app) and told her never to click any of them.

I'm surprised this isn't talked about very often, but they're clearly only being shown to the people who won't recognise them for what they are.

sofaofthedamned2• 9 years ago

I'm not on FB, but can you click in the corner of the advert and find out why you (or rather, your mum) was targeted? Is it demographic or interest based targeting?

justboxing• 9 years ago

The memes on this story tie the investigation together.

brokentone• 9 years ago

Seems like the article is incomplete. Another hour or two of investigation, actually proving a malware connection would have been really interesting.

TLDR: It's not a legitimate site, they're probably doing something silly, though not able to reproduce, and was able to find contact info on whois (assuming scammers don't know how to mask identities).

helmett• 9 years ago

if one knew how much money these people make doing this stuff, one would be tempted to do it too. Folks made millions doing this because Facebook is slow to ban the domains

had2makeanacct• 9 years ago

Anyone know how to execute a mail bomb?

https://www.whois.com/whois/deltaa-com.us

Psilidae• 9 years ago

Aside from malware, this might just be trying to get a lot of likes on a facebook page. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but there's definitely a demand for pages with a large quantity of likes. I have a page that has 100,000+ likes and I get multiple messages every day inquiring to "buy" (read: steal) the page. So, a scam like this might just be trying to fill a page with likes for whatever market exists for well-liked pages.

kabes• 9 years ago

Since there was no way I was going to Share the link, this was my stopping point.

Note that you could share it with the visibility set to 'only me' and after confirmation delete it again.

Clicking on a Facebook Scam to See What Would Happen

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