Cybercrooks Stealing Facebook Likes to Build Scam Credibility

Cybercriminals are a crafty bunch.

Many of us are familiar with the strategies they use in order to build credibility for their scams: asking you to like their page, demanding that you post a comment in favor of their “special offer “or flashing the logo of a reputable organization.

Now it appears that scammers are realizing that they don’t need your cooperation in order to gain more Facebook likes – they can just steal someone else’s!

Yes, researchers at Zscaler have found that cybercrooks are now coding Facebook Like widgets on their scam pages to display the number of ‘Likes’ for a completely different website that has a large number of Facebook likes.

According to the post by Julian Sobrier at Zscaler, internet scammers had created a fake page that was set to look like a newspaper article covering a work-from-home opportunity.

In addition to faking endorsement from multiple news companies, the crooks had embedded the Facebook Like widget from CBS’s Facebook page to make it look like over 214,000 users had recommended their work-at-home scam story to their Facebook pals.

Typically scammers post a screenshot of a Facebook ‘Like’ widget, so this technique is fairly new. Rest assured that it’s likely that we’ll be seeing a lot more of it.

While there are a *few* work from home jobs that are legit, majority of them are nothing more than a big fat scam. Don’t fall for it!

Follow us on Twitter at @hyphenet or “Like” us on Facebook to stay up-to-date on the latest tech news and PC security alerts.