The “Facebook Killer” – Facebook Scam

Most people think that the social networking giant, Facebook, is a place to share photos and connect with people. Unfortunately, the network is also used to spread fake/scam messages that play with users’ belief, compelling them to click on such scam messages.
A new scam has spread quickly across Facebook this weekend, pretending to be a link to a TV news report about an alleged Facebook killer.

(FOX NEWS VIDEO)- Salt Lake City – The “Facebook-Killer”
07-29-2011 – News reports of a man they are calling the ‘Facebook Killer’ have gone rampant, he has claimed 9 lives in the United States so far that we know ..

(FOX NEWS VIDEO) The “Facebook-Killer”
This scam has a localized variation that uses the city of the person infected in the headline. This is undoubtedly done to grab the attention of their friends and unsuspecting users.

Clicking on one of these links will take you, not to a genuine TV news report from the likes of CNN, but to a fake YouTube webpage instead, where you are tricked into sharing the link further with your online friends.

For those who have not learned the scammers’ trick yet, “Jaa” is Finnish for “Share”. If you click the button, you’re sharing the link with your friends before you have even seen the supposed video.

Finally after this, you got a page which shows that you are a YOUTUBE WINNER.

Don’t be tricked into clicking on such links and sharing them with your online friends – you’re only making life more profitable for scammers who earn a crust from creating new spam campaigns on social networks.

If you got hit by this scam, make sure you have removed the entries from your news feed (to stop them being shared amongst your friends), marked them as spam and checked your profile to ensure it does not have any unwanted “Likes” under your “Likes and interests”.

Ranjeet Menon