I just hate these videos which say “Girl killed herself, after her dad posted this to her wall” or a fake video of yours on YouTube about which I had written earlier. If you don’t realize the seriousness of theses scams, you perhaps don’t know how trojans spread through such scams on Facebook and how harmful it could be. May be after checking a previous post of mine, you could understand how harmful it could be. So lets see who these spammers are and what is the benefit they get out of spreading such trojans.
Recently I came across a link on one of my friend’s Facebook wall, which seemed to be like a YouTube video but it wasn’t.
YouTube videos usually open within Facebook but this link took me to a new page where I could discover something new:
UPDATE: Thanks to Google, after reporting this to them, they have removed the spam Blog listed here and all other spam blogs that belonged to the 3 profiles listed below.
Well, nothing is missing in my PC and the Install Plugin link will download a trojan to your PC similar to the previous case. The URL of the page is http://yikes-was-it-on-tv9.blogspot.com/ Hence this makes it clear that it’s a blogspot blog. Moreover, I kinda feel ashamed to say that it is monetized using Adsense. It is quite easy nowadays to get your Adsense account approved which is not good in some ways.
The comments you see below are not comments actually but an image. The page has right click disabled on it, however it is not tough to figure out the source of the image which is http://i.imgur.com/n7SoR.png This is not all, you can find this image or may be these false comments on many other pages which are used to spread Facebook Scams. Tineye didn’t return any results, hence I tried out with Google Image Search and the result was all those pages.
This shows that the same image is used on almost all of these spammy sites.
You can also find one of these scams using this image as a top trending topic on Facebook and Twitter according to Lynk.ly
Who are the Spammers Behind it?
Since it is a Blogspot blog, these are Bloggers unfortunately. The source code of the above page took me to three Blogger profiles with rel=”me” attribute. You would be shocked to check out their blogs. Check out the profiles of these three profiles which do not have any information about them but a hell lot of blogs or spam sites:
- Eula
- Rob
- Mandy
Naming these profiles does not mean these are their actual names, it’s quite easy to get a Google account and create blogs using it!
Why Blogspot?
There are quite a lot of reasons why you can use Blogspot to create spam or porn sites:
- Free domains, you don’t actually pay for subdomains on blogspot
- Free Privacy hence you can hide your identity from people
- Free Hosting as Blogspot blogs are not self hosted ones
- Easy to manage & delete blogs
- Create multiple Blogs using a single profile
Generating revenue using Adsense
Do you see this Google? Almost all of these sites contain ads from Google and this is the means by which they monetize using Adsense. This shows how easy it is to get Adsense accounts. Adsense accounts are also sold so that people could buy one instead of applying for a new Adsense account. I am not sure how this works but it is quite easy to get an adsense account. Such spams go viral on Social media as you share the content without your knowledge. This can take place by posting on wall, private messages or by chat.
That makes it really simple to create spams on Facebook though I have no idea about the codes behind those pages which force people to click on ads, go through surveys or share the content on Facebook.
One profile that appeared on the page has been disabled, I’m not sure if it was Google who did it, but there might be quite a lot of Blogger profiles used to spread spams on social media. Did you come across any such spams? Lets us know in the comments or report spam to Google.
Safeguard Yourself From Facebook Scams
If you have been infected by such Facebook scams or if you have been posting spams on your friends’ wall, check the link below to safeguard yourself.