Scammers LIKE Your Social Credits

How do I get Facebook credits? The official guidelines on how to buy things on Facebook state that credits are paid for in various ways. Special promos which might bring you credits oblige you to buy items from Facebook partners or complete tasks.

 Special promotions page for Facebook credits

Ok, but how do I get them for free?

The internet will give you more than 138 million answers, in words, pictures and video responses. Accept any of those answers and you might also get a free headache.Countless hacks, cracks, cheats or tipsabound. Which one’s really safe?

The really short and painful answer is: (probably) none. Let’s look at two free Facebook credit scams detected by Bitdefender Safego to see how these things generally work. 

First example: The bait: 2,000 Facebook credits TOTALLY free! The trap: Like, Share, Post.

I believe in miracles, so let’s click!

Pretty busy page, with the Facebook colors and fonts, supposedly Created by Facebook (nice touch, guys!). In an age where exceeds text longer than three lines qualifies as a novel, they’ve gone to the trouble of writing such an extensive preamble!

 

Ok. Then I’m supposed to do the following:

–          Like three pages I don’t have a clue about.

–          Share a message on my wall about this page, before I get anything from it.

–          Post a predefined message on my wall (the message shared before apparently isn’t enough) and then on three game pages.

Translation now: subscribe to three unknown pages. God knows what use they might be put to later on (you know, phishing, malware disguised as players, etc.). Then spread the word about this wonder five times! Smooth.

The scammers claim that at the end of this strenuous freebie acquisition process, they will verify whether all of the steps have been completed. Flash news: it is impossible to run such a check as you cannot have access to a Facebook user’s posts without an application. I haven’t installed any app so far, so this is just an excuse to keep me waiting. Who knows, if I decide to repeat the process (perhaps I did something wrong along the way), I’ll have not five, but 10 posts of mine endorsing this scheme.

A slightly different variant of this scam will simply ask you to place a comment on the scam page. As a result, the same comment will appear on your wall, which will get your friends into this credit trap as well.

 

Second example: A Facebook credits generator. Things get big…and black.

The page offers the possibility of seeing a short movie proving the efficiency of the generator which, by the way, is supposed to provide credits for Facebook games as well.

There follows the classic “Share this” and “post the message in 5 different places” requests. Finally, a pinch of salt to this scammy soup: a download button.

Don’t get your hopes high, though, as clicking the button takes you to the classic never-ending survey page.

Advice of the day: be careful where you get your credits! You might end up promoting scams.

Bitdefender Safego is there to help you stay away from such traps.

Click wisely and safely!

This article is based on the technical information provided courtesy of Tudor Florescu, BitDefender Online Threats Analyst.

All product and company names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and are the property of, and may be trademarks of, their respective owners.