Auto insurance site affiliate scam targets your Facebook friends
In Facebook, it is important to think about who you give access to. If you give permission to scammers, your account then becomes their spam tool. To illustrate, we followed one of those tiresome posts:
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Following the link required you to give an account named “world-news” permission to:
— post messages to your Facebook wall
— access all Facebook account data
— log in AS the Facebook account owner.
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Had you followed this (see below), here’s what would have appeared on your Facebook wall and on friends’ walls overnight: a post that appeared to be from your account “The earth is a spaceship” with a shortened link.
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And when friends wonder why you think the “earth is a spaceship” they see the following:
And clicking on them leads to auto insurance quote sites:
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But, alas, you get no information about the girl who ”took her life” and your friends never find out why the Earth is a spaceship. But then the initial verification page was named “prank of the week.”
Although this is just a tired scam by somebody hoping that you’ll do business with an auto insurance site and they’ll get some commission as an affiliate, the same mechanism is available for much worse — posts containing links to sites that download some serious malcode to name one.
Thanks Matthew.
Tom Kelchner