One of the great features of Facebook is that you can ‘Like’ something and it will come up in your friend’s news feeds, effectively sharing it with them.
When one of those cute pictures pops up of a toddler holding a sign that says, “If I get 10,000 likes, my mom and dad said I can have a brother or sister,” you may be more likely to think about liking it – but it’s not all it seems.
If you like it, it begins to pop up on news feeds, and can be shared across the network at an extreme pace. It’s part of a concept called ‘like farming’, which is making scammers a lot of money!
So how does the scam work? A scammer creates a page and posts cute/inspiring pictures. When you like the page, it shows up in your news feed. If you continue to comment on or like anything a page posts, it begins to show up more in your own news feed and then in your friends’ news feeds. The more it shows up, and the more likes and interaction it gets, the more power it gains.
But where’s the harm in this? When the page has a few thousand likes, its creator can place ads on the page. While these may be just for something they sell and want you to buy, they can also be ads for scams that debit money from accounts for products that never arrive or, worse, ads that when you click through them contain viruses that will infect your PC.
There’s a huge black market for selling Facebook pages with thousands of likes. Although Facebook says selling pages is against its terms of service, it does happen. Much of the time, the scammers appeal to our better nature with photos of children with diseases claiming you should click like if you want to find a cure. But many times, the images in these posts have been stolen from other social networking profiles and the person in question has no idea their image is being used.
But it’s not just tugging at the heart strings, scammers also appeal to our nature for freebies and create pages that claim you can win everything from hundreds of dollars in shopping vouchers for a new iPad or even a car, simply by liking and commenting. Once again, these are simply fake pages designed to generate likes.
If a page keeps popping up in your news feed with images or inspirational posts that appear to have nothing to do with the page itself, then unlike them. Click on the page. Before you enter any competitions, check the page is genuine. A good way to tell is to click on the page and, if it’s been registered by the company, it will have a blue tick next to the page’s name. If there’s no tick and you’re still unsure whether it’s genuine, scroll to the bottom of the page and see when the company joined Facebook. Most established brands have been on Facebook for quite some time. It’s very unlikely that they started a page just a couple of months ago. And if any of your friends look like they’re liking these fake pages, give them a gentle nudge!