PC World report that there have been a few fake pages offering different gift cards on Facebook over the last few months,
Welcome to the latest Facebook con game: fake gift cards. In the past months, fan pages have popped up all over the social networking site, offering too-good-to-be-true gift cards. There's the $500 Whole Foods card, the $10 Walmart offer, and the $1,000 Ikea gift card. The Ikea page put these gift card scams on the map last month, when it quickly racked up more than 70,000 fans before being snuffed. Facebook has also taken down Target and iTunes gift card scam pages in the past few months.
Many of these pages have fake posts suggesting that the giveaway offer worked, but the sites typically lead to affiliate marketing Web sites that try to collect data and generate Web traffic for advertisers, according to Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman.
The gift-card scams have been circulating via e-mail for years now, but they're still a novelty on Facebook.
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The company is trying to get the upper hand on the scammers, however. "We've started building an automated system to detect this type of suspicious content and behavior more quickly before it's even reported," Axten said in an e-mail interview.
Facebook won't say how many people have joined these fake groups, but according to Axten, "this is happening on a relatively minor scale, especially since we're quickly removing the groups and pages in many cases before they go viral."
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Topic: Fake gift card pages on Facebook (Read 76 times)
