Facebook scams involving free plane tickets aren’t a new thing, but we thought this was an interesting twist – the personal touch comes into play here.
The Bit.ly stats for this one reveals at least 99 Tumblr blogs (all of which had random user names made up of jumbled letters). The spamblogs directed users to an external site hosting a fake Southwest Airlines page asking them to sign into a Facebook application which now appears to be offline. Here’s an example of one of the spamblogs:
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This is what would be posted to a Facebook user’s page:
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Notice that the name of the person “posting” the spam is mentioned in the spam picture itself – the personal touch mentioned earlier, and probably a good way to encourage other Facebook users to click away at the offered links.
At time of writing, the website hosting the free tickets has had around 293,000 clicks in the last 14 days so maybe the tactic paid off. As always, be wary of free plane tickets on Facebook and elsewhere because there’s likely a catch (and there’s also a good chance you won’t get any free plane tickets, for that matter).
The GFI Labs Team (Thanks to Errorad for the FB screenshot and for sending this over)
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