WARNING: Don't Click On 'Teenage Mom Jailed'
Watch out for spamware saying a teenage mother landed in jail for her Facebook photo upload.
Don’t click on any posts declaring that a teenage mother landed in jail for uploading a disgusting photo of her baby on Facebook. You’ll never get to see any such imagery while clicking through window after window to help this spammer earn affiliate commissions.
Major props go to David Foster at Hubze for spotting this spam scam very early in its potential life cycle. Such quick thinking can really make a difference in possibly preventing these applications from spreading very far. We just hope timing doesn’t work in the spammer’s favor — those empowered to block bad applications simply aren’t around during a holiday weekend.
Anyone who clicks on the teenage mom posts in a news feed gets taken to a page on Blogspot stipulating that you can view the story after you click “like” on the page and then share the item. The former brings up a Facebook logon window.
I log on with a separate account to avoid spamming my friends and see that 2,700 people have already “liked” the story in order to read it.
Clicking on “share” pops open the familiar “post on profile” window — how polite for a spamware application to ask for permission before sticking something on your wall! That may explain why this particular application hasn’t gotten very far yet.
Possible politeness aside, clicking on the final link that promises to show you the story actually pops up a window saying you need to click on three ads in order to see the legendary baby pictures. No spamware would be complete without at least one misspelling, and apparently the number of photos has multiplied since the teaser post.
The next screen in this scam looks even more amateurish than average, showing about nine different affiliate programs related to photos. Clicking through any of them would earn the spammer a commission, at least if you signed up for any of the offerings as a result.
Don’t waste your time on this particular scam. Have you seen this spamware on any of your friends’ news feeds? Has someone reported it to Facebook yet? And can you venture a guess about the spammer’s origin?
