New scam targets ‘haters’ of Facebook Timeline

by Leigh Goessl (Guest contributor/Digital Journalist)

Recently Facebook unveiled its controversial Timeline feature and, perhaps not surprisingly, a new scam has surfaced on the social network that banks on the fact people often do not respond well to change.

Exploiters are targeting Facebook users with the hope of snagging those who have an intense dislike of Timeline, playing on those emotions in order to provoke a user response.

In this case, the exploiters are hoping people hate the network’s new Timeline feature and attempt to lure users into believing they can revert back to the previously designed Facebook. The fraudsters bait with fake instructions on how to “go back to the ‘old’ Facebook,” playing on their emotions if they are adverse to the change.

According to All Facebook, the tricks being used are fake ‘Like’ buttons, invites to friends, asking users to view YouTube videos, and, as characteristic to scams, a download that directs to an extension that contains probable malware.

AllFacebook notes that at the time of report 16 Timeline-related scam pages were live on Facebook. This reporter did a search and counted 10 at the time of publication, the highest of which had 12,436 likes listed, so it seems Facebook has been removing these scams; however many still exist and people are still ‘liking’ the fraudulent pages.

According to Web Pro News, one of the scams has several odd steps designed to trick users and despite asking to click over a dozen ‘likes’ as one step, thousands have fallen for the trick (click the Web Pro link to see the graphic). Other pages reportedly look more legit.

Facebook has no visible warning, nor a mention on the company’s security page to let users know a conversion back is not an option for users whose profiles have been switched to Timeline — once this happens, the feature is here to stay.

Eventually all profiles will convert to Timeline.Anyone wanting to take part in the future of the network will have to ultimately accept the Timeline change; there are no magic steps to get rid of it as Mark Zuckerberg and company have made it clear Timeline is here to stay.

Pages that offers any sort of button, link or download to ditch Timeline is a scam and those behind the ruses could be nabbing personal information and spamming the victim’s friends. Scams routinely surface on the social network that currently boasts over 800 million members, and the ‘Timeline scam’ is the latest of many.

This article was originally published on Digital Journal [Link]