People may lose money in fake competitions on Facebook

The attackers often try to obtain information necessary for online transactions.

Illustrative stock photoIllustrative stock photo (Source: SME)

Fake competitions on the social network Facebook abuse people’s trust. The victims may lose money after giving their personal details, the number of their payment card and all the data necessary for online transactions to their administrators, warned anti-virus software producer Eset.

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Several Facebook pages promise that people can win luxurious cars, mobile phones or washing machines.

“All they need to do to participate in these facebook competitions is to like the page and share or comment on the post, so they end up sharing the fake among their Facebook friends,” explained Lukáš Štefanko, malware analyst at Eset, as quoted in a press release.

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These fake competitions have more than 39,000 likes. The statistics suggest that one user shared such a fake post every two minutes on Facebook.

The main principle of these fake competitions is that “everybody” is a winner. The participants are contacted by a fake administrator of the competition via a message that asks them about personal details and information about a payment card, referring to the verification of the user’s identity.

“Internet users should realise once and for all that not everything on the internet is real,” Štefanko said. “If it is also too good to be true, it is most probably a deception.”

Internet users may help potential victims by reporting the pages such as Win it, Winning day or Rossa Fashion to administrators. One of the websites was also mentioned by the Slovak police on its official Facebook profile. All of the pages are linked to the Modernevyhry.sk website which Eset labels as dangerous.

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Moreover, they reported the page to the Facebook security team, with which they communicate the incidents. Eset hopes the pages will soon be erased.

The company also warns of a new wave of RayBan swindle spread via Facebook in the Slovak version. The aim is to share fake pages that gather information about users’ payment cards. The pages are promoted via photos depicting the sale of Ray-Ban sunglasses. The attackers however are abusing the name of a well-known brand. Neither the company nor its distributors offer any discount that is as high as 90 percent, Eset explained.

The attackers or malware then put several pictures of fake pages into users’ photo albums, accompanied by a hyperlink to the sites. They also tag the users’ friends.

The visits to these websites are not harmful, but the problem appears when the users want to pay for the discounted goods that they may not even receive. Eset warns that the attackers may receive the information necessary for online transactions from the payment card which they obtain from the fake websites. Their servers are usually situated in China, in unencrypted versions, according to Eset.

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