January 4, 2012  

Facebook Dollar General fake gift card is also connected to profile viewer spam app

Usually fake gift card offers that plague Facebook lead users just to a scam survey. But from time to time, scammers try to do things differently and surprise us with a new twist. Adding new elements to the scheme, this scam also leads to a spammy profile viewer app besides the ‘normal’ survey trap. Starting from the top, allow me to show you the text that should excite users into clicking the link:

If you did not know as was my case, Dollar General is an online shopping website. And now they are in a select company, joining the likes of Walmart, Best Buy, Target and others, having been chosen as bait for users. Clicking on the link will bring up this screen.


This path is well-known to users that have encountered at least one fake gift card offer. But this is where it gets interesting. The scam is linked with a scammy app as you can see below:


This is a method that was widely used in the first part of last year, but which has since disappeared from the scammer’s preference list. Accepting this app allows it to post other scams on your wall without your explicit permission after the initial Allow. And that means your friends will get tricked as well by texts posted in your name. Of course, at this moment, the app leads the user to another scam app which leads to the fake Apple offer, as you can see below (the scam is in Dutch because I am using a Dutch proxy to access the scam):


But this can change very easily into any other type of scam should the scammers chose to. As this road comes to a dead-end, I return to the initial scam text and click on the app that posted the scam on behalf of the user and this is what I end up with:


Yeap, it is the no 1 scam on Facebook: the profile viewer. Clicking to continue (as it says right there) I reach another suspicious app:


Going further brings us to the end of the scam…. drum roll:


No surprise here. The last part of the scam is the same fake survey which is present in all gift card scams that are appearing in Facebook walls.

If we are to recap the entire scam we end up with 3 fake surveys that try to get money from users, 2 apps that try to pose as those users on Facebook and no actual free gift card. I don’t think that is a plus. Do you?

I did not even get to finish writing this post that I saw that one of the scam apps had already posted an entry on my wall trying to get new victims. As you can see it involves the profile viewer app. Never forget to remove app once you they are fake ones.


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