Facebook Users Targeted by Phishing Scam

According to TechCrunch, a new phishing scam targeted at the Facebook users sends a message from Facebook 'friend' claiming for creating a new account and asks them to resubmit details using the given link, as reported by m-net on March 28, 2008.

But the given link directs users to the URL view-facebookprofiles.com. This domain is registered on Namecheap and hosted at Softlayer, which resembles login page of Facebook, but has nothing related with social network.

Receivers respond the message with resubmitting their Facebook details and ultimately, give access of their Facebook accounts to hackers who pricked information from there and send similar messages to others to propagate the scam.

The scam basically involves a message from a friend and appears on users profiles, saying that the user has made a new account on Facebook and is going to delete the current account. It asks the friend to add his new profile. So experts warn to be vigilant against such messages and check the messages several times to save personal information.

According to TechCrunch, the scam is not meant to get financial gains but a reader elaborated that the given link directed him to other Websites of pharmacies and ring tones. This way, the Website is just not advertising its products but also increasing Web traffic to generate more revenue through advertisement.

However, other readers said that many of their Facebook profiles contain personal information, including mobile phone numbers, age, home address, gender, and e-mail address which a scammer can use for accessing bank accounts.

Till now, the motive of scammers behind running such scam and how many parts have been affected by it is not clear yet. One tipper disclosed that many of his friends became victim of the scam.

Facebook has always been an easy target for attackers to carrying out malicious activities. There are some cases in which fake pages, resembling to original pages, loaded to extract personal details of users such as user names and passwords. The masterminds behind such scams often use users' information to propagate scams to other accounts which are linked to hacked accounts or to spread malicious content.

Related article: Facebook Users Should be Careful of a Computer Virus

» SPAMfighter News - 4/7/2008