Facebook trumps email for spam success

Facebook spam is more successful than email spam and more lucrative, too. Those were some of the findings in a study performed by an Internet collective of security professionals, according to the Winnipeg Sun.

The findings shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone familiar with Facebook. A problem with email spam is that much of it is anonymous. If a junk message is lucky enough to evade a network’s spam defenses and end up in a recipient’s inbox, it lacks credibility because the recipient has no idea who sent it. A message appearing in a Facebook news stream, on the other hand, has at least a veneer of credibility because it originates from a network of “friends” created by the recipient. Add that to the size of the target pool–500 million active users and counting–and their high activity rate–50 percent of them log on to the network on an given day–and you’ve got an irresistible attraction for spammers.

Unlike their email counterparts, social network spammers don’t need large volumes of dupes to make substantial sums, according to the study. However, it added, Facebook scams have been known to produce hundreds of thousands of clicks once they go viral on the network.

A common scam perpetrated by Facebook spammers involves SMS subscriptions. It works like this. Spam news feeds are used to lure Facebook members to pages where they’re asked to complete surveys or questionnaires. For example, testing one’s IQ in something is a favorite on the service. What’s your baseball IQ, for example, or your World Cup IQ? Once the questionnaire is filled out, the spammer will ask for a cell phone number as a condition of revealing the results of the IQ test to the victim. The number is then used to subscribe the target to an SMS service. Those services send unsolicited messages to a phone on a periodic basis. The target is charged for the message and the spammer gets a cut of that charge.

The problem with surveys and questionnaires, though, is that people flitting the Internet don’t have the patience to fill them out. Clicking a button to indicate one “likes,” or gives a thumbs up to something, barely puts a crimp in a cybernaut’s surfing session. Filling out a survey or questionnaire–not a cherished activity either inside or outside cyberspace–is another matter entirely. When the bloom was first on the questionnaire approach, merely offering results may have been an effective way for spammers to induce guppies to take the hook of a scam in their mouths, but it rapidly lost its efficiency.

Spammers found they had to raise the ante if they wanted meaningful participation numbers in their shenanigans. They began to disguise their intent better by creating fan and group pages. Some of those pages, stripped of their injurious content, have been gathered by a website called bypassfanpages.com. Many of the pages try to attract a target with a tantalizing headline. “10 Secret Tips To Get Any Guy to Ask You Out!” shouts one headline. “OMG! You WON’T believe what this SICK old man put in a 9 year old GIRLS halloween candy!!” screams another containing grammatical errors, a trademark of spammers the world over.

Once they attract potential victims to one of those pages, they offer them various perks, always bogus, to snare them. They may offer free products, some kind of bonus or an enhanced feature set for joining the group, getting others to join the group and finally, for filling out the nefarious questionnaire.

Even those methods, though, are beginning to wear thin with social networkers, the study reported. Its authors discovered that in many cases, while clicks indicating visitors favored a page might be zooming, click-throughs to the content being teased by the page were pallid, as low as a few dozen.

          “That’s good news,” the study said. “Examination of the data demonstrates that fewer and fewer people actually continue on to ‘step 3,’ which is filling out the survey.”

“The vast majority of people bail out of the process after simply liking the page, or after sharing the link,” it added.

While the word about Facebook scams spreads quickly, it doesn’t seem to be deterring the scammers, the study noted. That’s because the junko artists still appear to be able to turn a buck with their schemes.