I have come across a lot of my friends doing this on Facebook and I bet all of them have no idea it’s scammers…
But are you unknowingly making scammers rich?
Scammers will make a random named Facebook page that they think people may ‘like’ such as ‘Do you ever go into a room and forget what you went in for’ – How many times have we all done that? So, you may ‘like’ the page because you can relate.
They will then start putting out posts on that page that they want to go viral.
The most popular, and awful, that I see on a regular basis is ‘Freddie has cancer, don’t scroll further without saying Amen’ and because we are decent human beings and want Freddie to get better, we will say Amen.
Others I’ve seen may say…
- Share this photo and fortune will come your way in 24 hours
- Click this photo to see what happens
- ‘Like’ if you can see the cat in the photo
- ‘Like’ if you are against animal abuse – These normally come with a sickening image
You get my drift anyway…
The way Facebook works is, once a page has collected thousands of likes and comments, it will appear higher in people’s News Feeds on Facebook.
Once the pages have collected a huge number of ‘Likes’, they are then sold for cash to other businesses who use them to make their page appear popular. An extremely popular Facebook page with a lot of likes, shares and comments can be sold for quite a bit of money – I am approached often asking if I will sell my page, which I have no plan on doing.
The buyer then changes the page details, and quite often the name of the page.
They now have an instant fan page with a big following, lots of likes and interaction on their posts – perfect to set up a dodgy scam business quickly.
They may start asking for personal details through surveys they put out or they could start selling fake products or products that don’t exist, in order to get their hands on your hard-earned cash.
Recently, there has been a prime example of someone doing this. Someone posted a picture exploiting a young boy’s disability. The scammer found a picture of 7-year-old Daire Flanagan, who unfortunately suffers from a genetic deformity called Apert Syndrome. This is a deformity that causes the person to have an unusually shaped head.
The scammer posted the picture on their Facebook page, telling people that, because of his deformity, ‘no-one would give a like and share’. Sadly, this worked. The post got over 6,000 likes and 900 shares.
His mother was sickened when she saw the image circulating on social media, she told her story to The Sun here…
For more information about this story, Go Here.
So, next time you see a post that is asking you to like or comment before you scroll further, keep scrolling.
For information on spotting Facebook competition scams, click here…
