One of the ways people get scammed on facebook is from the ads that they let advertisers show on facebook pages. Facebook has tried to root out all of the scammy and misleading advertising on their site, but with so many advertisers, they have a self-service platform where anyone can place an ad, they can’t get rid of all of them.
One of the most popular scams that advertisers run is called the IQ Quiz scam and variants thereof. BTW they run this because its so profitable for them as the number of people that are tricked is so high. Basically, the user will click on an ad that entices them with a tagline like “See if you are smarter than your friends?” or “Find out how smart you really are!”. Anything that gets you to click on this ad that prepares you to answer some questions.
Once the user clicks on the ad, he or she will answer a series of questions, usually they are pretty basic, and at the end of the questions you have to enter your phone number to see the results. This is the scam part, once you enter your phone number you are agreeing to purchase some kind of reoccuring service where you will be billed weekly or monthly, usually around $10 to $20 dollars. If you read the fine print on the page where you are supposed to enter the phone number you will probably find some terms and conditions that describe exactly this, but most people don’t bother to read the fine print, you know that and the companies know this too!
Usually the companies will refund you if you complain and its your first time canceling this kind of service, but they won’t be so nice afterwards because these kind of services are very profitable for them too! Just to be clear here the phone companies themselves don’t run these advertisements or run the companies that offer the services, but they do basically let it slide since its not illegal, just pretty misleading.
One of the more common scams on facebook is something some people call clickjacking. It basically involves enticing viewers with something of interest. For instance, after Osama Bin Laden’s death, there were many ads on facebook that after you clicked on them, asked you to copy and paste a url into your browser in order for you to see his death photo.
Never ever copy and paste a url into your browser, once the unsuspecting person did this, this can unleash a software virus that can hijack your computer, normally this causes your computer to send out tons and tons of spam, spam that makes the hijacker money in some way. You probably won’t be blamed for the spam but it will seriously mess up your computer as well as slowing down to a crawl. Sometimes the only way to recover your computer is to completely wipe out your harddrive resulting in the loss of all your data.
Remember, if there are offers of something thats a little to interesting on facebook, and especially if its from someone you don’t know, DON’T DO IT!
This scam recieved a lot of newspress not just in Thailand but internationally as well probably because it was taking place INSIDE the airport by one of the official companies that won a bidding contract to provide retail services inside the airport.
Basically people were shopping in one of the duty free shops that are in every international airport in the world and had picked out an item which they were carrying around with them when they were arrested for shoplifting. Basically it was not allowed to take an item from one part of the store to another part of the store! That was considered shoplifting! Im not sure if there were signs posted or not, but irregardless, this kind of behavior is unacceptable.
But this is where the scam just starts unfortunately. Because in Thailand getting oneself out of legal trouble is not a straightforward process like it is in the West, and is typically where the profit is made during the scam. Needless to say, it requires much wrangling with authorities, shady third parties who intervene on your behalf for large sums of money in order to avoid the threat of a lengthy prison sentence.
Now to be fair there was a counterpoint made by the company involved claiming they had videotape of the person putting something in their purse, but this was not the only person who had complained about the scam so its hard to believe the company in this case, as well as, who the heck shoplifts in the duty free of an international terminal anyway!?!
