I've already received two Facebook spam messages (one from my own daughter's account) and this weekend the activity began to increase rapidly. It would seem that many people are falling for spam, perhaps because when you are within the comfort of your own social networking page, your defenses are down.
The first message my daughter forwarded warned that there were too many people on Facebook and the infrastructure was failing. Here's the text:
Attention all Facebook members.
Facebook is recently becoming very
overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is
becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many
non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook
members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are
active or not,If you're active please send
to 15 other users using Copy+Paste
to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2
weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more
space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but
until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this
message to show me that your active and not deleted.
Founder of
Facebook
Mark Zuckerbe
I reminded her (and her friends) that this has the hallmarks of a chain letter, though it doesn't (at least from what I can tell) look to be a phishing scam. There's no link directing her to another site or page.
But the one sent to me from a friend (and a very religious woman) caught my attention and concern. It said, "Is that you making love?" and contained a link to watch a video. Hmm. Not likely to have been a message from my friend. I wasn't really surprised to start hearing reports of this and similar messages hitting most of my Facebook community. Here's a news report with more details.
Of course, you don't want to fall victim to these sorts of spam messages. The first kind is just annoying because it panics inexperienced web users like my daughter. The second, naturally is far worse, since being redirected to an unknown site can cause you to get infected with viruses and keystroke loggers.