The trouble with being the latest big thing on the internet is that everyone wants a piece of your success. Including scammers.
As we reported yesterday, scams are appearing on Facebook. And because Facebook is so huge, people are falling for them.
It isn’t entirely Facebook’s fault, either. There’s an old computer helpdesk acronym, PBKC, which stands for “Problem lies Between Keyboard and Chair”. And that, says PC Mag’s Lance Ulanoff, is what is afflicting Facebook.
He writes:
“Facebook’s problem, and one that won’t go away anytime soon, is that its members can’t resist a good link.”
Exactly. And Facebook is designed to spread links from one person to the next.
Many of Facebook’s users are too young, and not web-savvy enough, to be suspicious of the temptations dangled before their eyes via Facebook friends.
As a result, they see a weird link and they click it. That may open a new web page, which isn’t necessarily dangerous in itself – it depends what that web page contains. Embedded malware posing as a simple Flash game? Attempts to phish for personal data?
Facebook might be called a “walled garden” by some of its critics, but the wall here has huge gaps in it, through which you can see, and climb out into, the rest of the web.
Just as you should be careful what you click elsewhere on the net, treat stuff on Facebook with similar care. Top tip: if it sounds too good to be true, the chances are the link was designed to be that way. Scammers hook in more suckers by deliberately making their links as tempting as possible.
So if you see something claiming to show you something incredibly amazing or downright unlikely, just pause for a moment, and think before you click.