
Clicking on a Facebook Scam to See What Would Happen - bhalp1
https://dev.to/_theycallmetoni/i-clicked-on-a-facebook-scam-to-see-what-would-happen
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brokentone
Seems like the article is incomplete. Another hour or two of investigation,
actually proving a malware connection would have been really interesting.

TLDR: It's not a legitimate site, they're probably doing something silly,
though not able to reproduce, and was able to find contact info on whois
(assuming scammers don't know how to mask identities).

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kabes
> Since there was no way I was going to Share the link, this was my stopping
> point.

Note that you could share it with the visibility set to 'only me' and after
confirmation delete it again.

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Psilidae
Aside from malware, this might just be trying to get a lot of likes on a
facebook page. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but there's definitely a
demand for pages with a large quantity of likes. I have a page that has
100,000+ likes and I get multiple messages every day inquiring to "buy" (read:
steal) the page. So, a scam like this might just be trying to fill a page with
likes for whatever market exists for well-liked pages.

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justboxing
The memes on this story tie the investigation together.

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Apocryphon
Is this a regular thing, to see phishing or malware scams in Facebook ads?

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mcintyre1994
Yep, but you'll probably never see them. I never see them but I always see
them on my mum's Facebook whenever I'm home. My guess is there's two main
factors:

1) Abusing Facebook targeting to proxy for 'non-technical' in some way.

2) Presumably if you click Facebook ads you get more similar ones, for some
criteria. So if you got them you wouldn't click, and they'd disappear.

Facebook are terrible at policing this - I'd guess >50% of the stuff they're
paid to show my mum is a blatant scam - if somebody spent 10 seconds looking
at each ad I've seen there before accepting it they'd spot all of them. I've
basically tried to show my mum how to identify something that will take her
outside of the app (not that easy on the Android app) and told her never to
click any of them.

I'm surprised this isn't talked about very often, but they're clearly only
being shown to the people who won't recognise them for what they are.

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sofaofthedamned
I'm not on FB, but can you click in the corner of the advert and find out why
you (or rather, your mum) was targeted? Is it demographic or interest based
targeting?

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mcintyre1994
That's a really good point, I'll have to ask if we can try that next time! I
just had a look at one of mine and the top line was "One reason you're seeing
this ad is that Habito wants to reach people who may be similar to their
customers." which is pretty vague. The next bit mentioned 18+ and in the UK,
and a few others mentioned age too so maybe it'd at least give that much.

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sofaofthedamned
Twitter is even worse with this. I block all advertisers, but they've recently
added the ability to see why you were targeted - each of them states I was
targeted because i'm in the UK, even for stuff that's only relevant to another
country, Kenya was the last example.

There is a targeting problem that helps TW/FB, or there is a reporting problem
that helps nobody.

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had2makeanacct
Anyone know how to execute a mail bomb?

[https://www.whois.com/whois/deltaa-
com.us](https://www.whois.com/whois/deltaa-com.us)

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helmett
if one knew how much money these people make doing this stuff, one would be
tempted to do it too. Folks made millions doing this because Facebook is slow
to ban the domains

