Like-Farming scammers using Facebook Live Video

Here’s something new. Like-farming scammers using Facebook’s Live Video Streaming with their like-farming posts to promote fake giveaways.

Our regular readers will be more than aware that the typical like-farming fake giveaway post is a post claiming you need to share it (and like the page and usually comment on it too) to win some freebie, attached to a photo of whatever freebie you’ll apparently be winning, like a Range Rover, airline tickets or a gift voucher, for example.

Basically something like the post below.

Pretty standard. But in a worrying twist of events, we are now seeing like-farming spammers using Facebook’s Live Video feature (that allows people or pages to stream video to their followers live) to promote their like-farming campaigns.

See the post below.

GIVEAWAY – 100X WINNERS!
August 30/2016 ! 100 Lucky Winners Will Be Messaged via Facebook On 30 August 2016.
Step 1) Like this post.
Step 2) Comment which color you want.
Step 3) Share On Your wall.
Step 4) Make Sure That You Like This Page
Good Luck to everyone ..! ❤️

In this post, you can see that the like-farming page, iPhone 6, was live. The blurb attached to the post is a pretty standard like-farming post, but instead of a photo, the “live” video is attached. Now, if you’re wondering what the live video actually was, it was actually just a replay of an UnboxTherapy smartphone review.

So while the like-farming page was streaming the video live, the video itself wasn’t live. It was just a replay, and to clarify, UnboxTherapy – a popular review YouTube channel – have nothing to do with this scheme. They won’t know their video review was being used in this scheme.

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It’s actually a smart move on behalf of the scammers, because they’ll know that Facebook loves video right now. And what they love more than video is when their users use their Live Video feature. This means Live Videos get plenty of traction and reach across the site, more so than normal posts.

This increases the post reach, and at the time of writing the post above has over 10,000 shares despite only being posted (streamed) 15 hours from the time of writing.

When it comes to identifying the scam as a like-farming scheme, the rules are the same. The Facebook page iPhone 6 is clearly not an official outlet of either UnboxTherapy or Apple (no blue verification tick) and the page is jam packed full of other blatant like-farming posts asking you to share posts onto your timeline, which is against Facebook’s terms of service. Why this page has managed to avoid removal from Facebook is… unclear (especially since at the time of writing it has amassed over 690,000 fans) but don’t go joining it or sharing their content and always be on the lookout for like-farming pages using fake giveaways as bait.

Learn more about this type of like-farming here.