Facebook spammers are pretending to be grief-stricken friends of the Manchester Arena victims to trick people into following RIP Facebook pages and sharing posts.
We’ve spoken a number of times about how Facebook like-farmers are always willing to sink to some pretty callous levels in order to exploit and trick other Facebook users into liking and sharing their posts and following their pages.
Like-farming spammers are interested in one thing only. Getting people to follow their Facebook pages through whatever means necessary, even if that means deception or – as is the case here – depraved exploitation.
Like-farmers will lie, cheat, manipulate, provoke, mislead and emotionally exploit Facebook users, all to get them to share and like and comment and follow. Facebook pages with lots of followers are – after all – a valuable online commodity, and those pages that have ripened can be sold for serious bucks at any number of websites that deal with auctioning them off. Or, if the spammer is so inclined, the Facebook page can be used instead as a Launchpad for marketing spam or for your garden variety Internet scam. With reach comes opportunity. Something not lost on cyber crooks.
As such, it is perhaps of little surprise that when the identities of the Manchester Arena victims began to surface, each one ostensibly revealed hours after the previous as if to extend the pain forever, like-farming spammers soon got to work on their corrupt schemes.
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Soon after the identity of one such victim was released to the public – that of 18 year old self-professed Ariana Grande superfan, Georgina Callander – an RIP Facebook page appeared claiming to have been created by her “best friend”. The posts were heartfelt messages, but also asked Facebook users to “love and share” them.
In fact, all the posts asked users to love and share them.
One post incorrectly describes Georgina as 16 years old. She was 18.
A post gets Georgina’s age wrong.
The Facebook page was not set up by a friend of Georgina’s. It was set up by a like-farming spammer, keen to cash in on her death by exploiting other Facebook users into interacting with photos of her, sending them into the viral stratosphere. One such post nears 70,000 shares and counting as we write this.
And the follower count of the page clocks up each time we refresh the screen.
We all want to express ourselves on social media and share content that resonates with us. But in doing so it is important we’re not also playing into the hands of those set out to deceive and manipulate us. The RIP Georgina Callander page will hang around for a while and as soon as the memories of the Manchester attacks begin to ebb from the mainstream, it will be sold off. Reworded. Rebranded. Georgina’s smiling face will disappear and those many thousands of followers will be followers of something else entirely.
Please don’t fall for like-farming scams. Make sure the content you share and the pages you follow are genuine and not callous strangers looking to cash on tragedy for likes and shares.
