Facebook Spam

[dalej42]

I belong to a lot of Facebook groups. Almost daily, there are spam posts to the group with Clickbait headlines. “You won’t believe these teens on hidden camera!” or other such garbage.

What exactly is the point of this spam? Malware or spyware?

[Defensive_Indifference]

Sometimes it is malware of some kind. You click through and eventually get snookered into visiting a malicious web page or downloading some software (really a Trojan) to view the content.

More often it’s “like farming” (see herefor a good explanation). In a nutshell, whoever is running the clickbait is trying to rack up as many “likes” as possible in order to sell the page to marketers. From the linked article:

When they have accumulated a large number of likes - perhaps 100,000 or more - the scammers can then sell the Page to unscrupulous marketers. These marketers can then re-purpose the Page to suit their needs and use its large “like” base to blast out spam messages promoting their products or services. Selling Facebook Pages is clearly against Facebook’s Terms of Service. Nevertheless, there is a thriving underground market for established Facebook Pages and the more likes the Page has the more that it can potentially be sold for. There are even marketplace websites and forums set up specifically to buy and sell Facebook Pages. The marketplace for Pages is quite volatile and there are significant variations in listed prices. But, a Page with 100,000 Likes can sell for 1000 or more. Often, prices are calculated on a " per K" basis, i.e., the seller might set a base price of - for example - $2 per thousand likes.

I think that article is a couple years old, so the details and economics may have changed, but the principle is the same.