Spam-farm Facebook pages calling users to “Like This Post to [insert something here]” have been around, well, ever since the inception of the thumbs up action. It’s called a farming scam.
Most of the times, you can easily tell legit from fake Facebook pages without even researching it; I mean, do you seriously really think that BMW M’s division would ever give away two M5 sedans for Christmas through Facebook likes?
And let’s say for a minute you did, the fact that among the multiple postings on the newly created page shows the older generation of the M5 wrapped like a present (that picture was from a 2007 forum posting on M5Board) or even worse, images of the 2-Series Active Tourer, should ring a bell…
Said Facebook page is called “BMW M Power” (don’t click like or share it on your timeline…) and since this morning, it gained more than 30,000 Likes reaching over 100,000 by the time we wrote this post.
CNN had a report about Facebook Like Farming in January. “The average user doesn’t know any better,” Tim Senft, founder of Facecrooks, which monitors scams and other illegal or unethical behavior on Facebook, told the news station. “I think their common sense tells them it’s not true, but in the back of their minds, they think ‘What if it is true? What does it hurt if I press like?’ or whatever.”
According to the same report, typically, the purpose of these pages that draw tens or even hundreds of thousands of likes and shares in a very short time, is to either change the name of the page and promote something else or sell the page through black-market websites.
However, sometimes, there’s a darker motive as these pages may be used to spread malware, not directly (nothing will happen if you just click like), but through malicious Facebook apps or external links shared on the page.
So, next time you see something that’s too good to be true, then it probably is…
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