Facebook riddled by 'my first ever status message' scam app A new survey scam has hoodwinked thousands on Facebook. Users are being induced into filling out a worthless survey on the false promise of a dubious reward - a reminder of their first ever status message on the social networking website. These false promises appear as status messages from already fooled surfers, touting a …
Facebook clearly needs some kind of moderation, if they can't spare the cash (really!?) for internal staff then they should implement a peer review community to check these out. Even a Stars rating would help.
I was almost duped into a LinkedIn app the other day but it just didn't look quite right so I looked at the comments and right I was, if thats the only warning then something needs to be done.
They allow application ratings (which can include comments) and each application page has a "Report this application" link on it. But the sort of people who follow these sort of links probably wont look at the ratings nor are they likely to click on the report link.
FB are tightening up on developer accounts - you now need to authenticate using a confirmation code sent to a mobile phone.
No, no, no!
Living in a free society is the freedom not just to make decisions which others consider wise, but the freedom to make decisions which are foolish. Being an adult means taking responsibility for your own actions.
It isn't Facebook's responsibility to protect people from themselves.
Where there are no electrical safety regulations, any con-man can sell fake shares, airlines don't check their planes for metal fatigue (after all, you decided to get on the plane, it was YOUR responsibility to check the safety).
It is not just adults that should take responsibility for their actions, so should corporations. Facebook is providing a service (what service to who is another question), so it should have the responsibility to consider the implications of misuse, and provide a mechanism to at least help people protect themselves, e.g. moderation.
would fill out a ton of paperwork just to see what it was? When the fact that they can't remember clearly indicates that it wasn't interesting or important.
Imagine if I said "give me £50 and I promise to go to the local sewage treatment plant and find the first ever turd you flushed down all by yourself when you were a child" and for your £50 I'll just crap on your table right in front of you.
That's essentially what this scam is. A viciously evil hoax perpetrated on people so dense that they probably deserve it.
Your average facebook user is entrenched into the belief that giving facebook their identity is the done thing.
Given that your average user is also unlikely to understand how facebook apps work in any great detail, and the fact that facebook does not make it overt that you are talking to a 3rd party, I would be unsurprised if many thought it was just 'part of facebook'.
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
why do all these scammers do these things?!? i just want to be popular on the interwebs and my pc keeps getting slower!! i just want to be popular and make friends with everybody lol ;)
pls lol
oo a new post on my fb wall for security tool to fix and speed up my pc :) goody goody gumdrops
now i can be popular and safe ;) lol
Sorry...it's Friday, I just came back from a liquid lunch and couldn't help portraying what I perceive to be your typcial user of any social networking site.
Just thought I'd comment as one of the muppets that installed this app. Didn't fill out the survey, just saw it, thought 'arse' and deleted it. Did inspire me to get rid of a whole bunch of other shitty apps that I'd installed over the years though so I suppose it was actually quite useful.
If anyone actually wants to find out their first status message, all they need to do is go to their Account Settings page, and click the "Download your information" link. It's recently-launched, and compiles a zip file of all your pictures and posts from Facebook, and is the first genuinely useful thing to come out of Facebook in a long time.
From the article:
"The latest scam is noteworthy not because of its basic premise, which is unoriginal, but because it has spread widely in a short period of time since first appearing on Thursday."
The speed with which such "infections" spread is directly proportional to the number of d***heads who install the app. This in turn gives us a very clear statistical picture of the number d***heads who use what should now be renamed as (Silly)ArseBook.
Usually it appears to come from a friend and the subject line is always the same. It reads, "Joe Blow has invited you to be his friend on Facebook!" From there it's little more than a link to a page that wants all your private information in exchange for more spam. I hear they even made a movie about the scammer running the whole thing. Go figure.
Hardly suprising - in the 'real' world, people fall for all sorts of scams, usually out of greed.
One born every minute, two to take them.
I ditched my facebook account over a year back & created a pretty much blank one, just so I can view photo's etc. of family & friends who insist on using it.
It's the reason I joined the damn thing in the first place - dragged in kicking and screaming.
Now I have to develop stupid facebook apps for the damn thing at work, which reminds me of coding for ie5.5 - it's a nightmare.
It seems, no matter how I try, I can't get away from Fakebook.
Paris, because she's fake.
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