Do not click! These are the Facebook hoaxes you need to avoid

Now that Facebook has billions of users, it also has billions lots of spam and hoax posts making the rounds. Unfortunately, these posts can look like normal status updates, and one click can spam your entire social network and give a scam a viral life.
This problem isn’t going anywhere: In fact, these ploys are picking up – social media scams accounted for 53 percent of scams in 2012 – with a 42 percent increase in “targeted” dox attacks (attacking with knowledge of the victim’s personal information) says Norton Security. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up some of the recent Facebook hoaxes plaguing the social network that you should keep an eye out for and avoid. So check out what’s infecting Facebook and seriously, do NOT click if you see any of the following show up in your own News Feed.

Farming Facebook likes

 

If you check out hacker forums, you’ll find endless resources attributed to farming Facebook likes from fake and real users. Let me start off by saying that there’s no one in particular that’s being scammed here. It’s probably the least direct “hoax” on this roundup, but you might wonder what’s the value in this strategy. Well Facebook likes, as simple as they may seem, are very, very important to marketers using the platform and they’ll stop at nothing to get them.

This hoax is a simple one. Create a Facebook page that evangelizes a product, game, service, or whatever you can think of, going as far as suggesting that the page is endorsed by the brand that the page was created around, and amass followers. The “hoax” here is in the method of how these pages garner followers.

You might have seen Facebook Pages that host a giveaway – for example, a smartphone if the page is dedicated to a certain type of smartphone. Many of these hoaxes will end up asking for likes and shares (which attracts your friends) to participate in said “contest,” but the catch is that these contests aren’t actually giving away anything. There’s no prize in the first place. A quick Google search is really enough for these “farmers” to take a photo for the purposes of this faux contest. And to farm more followers, these false contests are published regularly or tend to suggest that it’s offering hundreds of products for these giveaways.

Now how much money is there in this? Let’s just say that marketers are out there with a bit of money looking to take these popular Facebook pages off of the creator’s hands for around $1,000 per 100,000 follower Facebook page.

Facebook will save starving children by donating $1 per share … except not really

Tap into empathy and you’ll dupe enough people to make a quick buck. There’s a charity hoax going around, asking Facebook users to share a photo of a malnourished and sickly child, with the idea that every share will amount to $1 donated by Facebook to a charity.

Well, Facebook might be benevolent but it wouldn’t leave how much money a charity should receive up to its users. Trust us, the company has plenty of money to donate as it sees fit.

The creators of the hoax are simply trying to accumulate likes and shares in a rather unethical manner, using random images of sickly children from the Internet. Since in some instances these photo posts might include a link to a certain webpage or Facebook page, you can see how it might drive traffic to a target URL rather quickly.