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I've seen a few Facebook groups be spammed with what would appear to be obvious scams - usually posted as links to articles with titles such as "Single mother of two from Edinburgh made £11,000 working from home in a week" with a link going to a website made up of random words.
Obviously I have never clicked to follow the articles as clearly a scam and a load of nonsense.
But I'm curious, how do these things work? Are we still in an age where going to a dodgy website/clicking a link from Facebook can infect your computer with a virus, or has inbuilt antivirus stuff evolved to mostly protect users now from this rudimentary approach? Are these scams sites just looking to hook vulnerable / desperate folk into giving out personal or banking information to be sold on?
And who on earth thinks they can make half a million pounds a year in between looking after their toddlers and the jobs paying this bountiful amount are so numerous they have to post job adverts in random Facebook groups?
I'm perplexed!
I'd imagine all of the above. Malware injection through malicious ads is a real thing as not everyone has protection, and knowing that someone is vulnerable/desperate can lead to good old fashioned money scams (see previous threads here, for example).
see cold calling scams and old fashioned junk mail. if they didn't get a good enough return they wouldn't do it.
what that level of return is, I don't know.
someone here must know? or make up a convincing answer.
I once read that they don't bother putting much effort in as it automatically filters out less gullible people, leaving the scammers more time to focus on easier targets. Not sure if true but it seemed plausible.
The "hundreds of random words with a link in the middle" thing I think may be some kind of google bait to drive up the search result rank of the linked page.
The “hundreds of random words with a link in the middle” thing I think may be some kind of google bait to drive up the search result rank of the linked page.
Just poor copy editing 😉
And who on earth thinks they can make half a million pounds a year in between looking after their toddlers and the jobs paying this bountiful amount are so numerous they have to post job adverts in random Facebook groups
Only fans or has that cash cow avenue closed now?
I assumed the "scam" was simpler than that. Because they appear so prominently in the adverts on (vaguely reputable) sites like local news that you'd think if there was a "scam" then they wouldn't want to be associated with it.
Pay for one advert on facebook/news etc, then every time someone clicks your add you serve them a page with 10's more. As long as the cost you pay the 1st site per click is less than the amount your paid per visitor to your site, then you're in profit. Hide the fact that "Single mum of 3 makes £30k/month from home" actually was the winner of one of those lottery games years ago after 39 pages of clickbait and you've made your millions (or at least a few quid).
^^ this sounds logical to me. It also means that it's the advertisers getting defrauded, rather than the user, which is nice.
not everyone has protection
Everyone with a Windows OS written in the last ten years has AV protection. Linux / Mac users are (sorry) too much of an outlier for malware scammers to care about targeting.
It's the wetware that's the problem. Stop clicking on things.
I once read that they don’t bother putting much effort in as it automatically filters out less gullible people
Yeah, this is intentional. Sending out emails (Facebook ads, [insert delivery platform here]) is easy and cheap. Actually landing a mark involves actual work and is comparatively time-consuming and expensive. The last thing a scammer wants is to spend half a day reeling someone in only for them to go "hang on a minute..." and get cold feet at the 11th hour. If you hook someone with an obviously fake email / post then as you say, you've just filtered out those with a degree of critical thinking.
Everyone with a Windows OS written in the last ten years has AV protection.
Except for the ones who have disabled it because they think it slows down their computer or Microsoft is trying to steal their holiday photos or whatever other reason drives people to disable it.
You'd have to try really hard to do that with any sort of longer-term success.
And in any case, meh. Too bad.
Except for the ones who have disabled it because they think it slows down their computer or Microsoft is trying to steal their holiday photos or whatever other reason drives people to disable it.
Sounds like my dad. He is so paranoid about internet scams to the point that he'll unplug the wi-fi whenever he 'logs off'. At the same time he'll actively turn off every security feature on his ancient PC and reject every update. In spite of these efforts he's easily sucked in to a fake email or call to mine and my sister's dismay!