Beware of Facebook Scams

No place is safe to enter our personal information, unless it’s an official company site or a web page where we are completely sure its secure. Other than that, no website is safe when we enter our full name, home address, email address, or phone number, and more dangerously, our number of credit card or bank account. Never leave your data exposed.

Now it looks like Facebook is the new target of scammers. They are trying to take advantage of the popularity of the social networking site. But how? It’s actually much simpler than what you may think. How many applications have you installed without really knowing what it is? Remember the: “How to know who has viewed your profile?” Or “Who blocked you?” Well in reality there is no known, or at least there’s no official way to know who has viewed or blocked you. But many people don’t know that and they are eager to know who blocked or viewed their profile. So when they hear they can do so by downloading or installing an application, they do it immediately without verifying the app is valid or not.

They way this scams work is that they usually invite to accept an installation of something else other than just the application and in some cases they may request your personal data. Or when you want to revise a PDF document or other file on the network they ask you to fill out a form. Be careful when you are asked something like that, because most likely it’s a scam.

It’s evident that it has become very popular to send invites for different events through Facebook. Events of all kinds, from conferences, seminars, workshops and more. This is the last of the techniques being used to attract attention from users: personal data and if possible, some money for registration.

According to a report of TrendMicro, a considerable number of users have registered in recent times in some kind of online event they believed to be real. But in reality it ended up to be the work of spammers or fraudsters. This type of activity, along with misleading advertising is one of the current sources of fraud and theft of personal information. To make them more attractive, they use their imagination in the writing of names and subjects that may tempt even the highest skeptics.

So my suggestion is that when you install an application or open a file (especially in a website like Facebook) and see that they ask for your personal information and other vital information, either don’t install the application or investigate whether they application is safe or not. It is better to have excessive distrust, than to end with empty pockets. So be very careful.