Romance scammers operating on Facebook are increasingly turning to ‘comment spam’ to target potential victims using the social media platform.
If you’ve ever heard security advice akin to “don’t send money to people you’ve never met in person” then this advice is very likely warning about romance scammers.
Romance scams, fundamentally, are especially simple scams. Scammer pretends to be a singleton looking for love online in order to befriend a victim > Scammer develops relationship with victim > Scammer spins various tales to avoid ‘in-person’ contact > And finally scammer spins more tales to persuade victim to send over money. Needless to say, the victim loses any money they send over to the scammer.
The stories spun by the scammers can differ greatly. And so can the Internet platforms used to locate victims. Perhaps inevitably, the world’s most popular social media platform -Facebook- is frequently used by romance scammers. More specifically, comment spam can be used to target victims on Facebook.
Any comments that we make on public posts – for example any post made by a Facebook page which are always publicly available – can be seen by the entire Facebook community. And it also means anyone can reply to the comment.
Comment spam refers to unwanted and spammy replies to our comments from accounts that we do not know. That is to say, you comment on a post made by a Facebook page and then a ‘stranger’ Facebook account replies to your comment with either spam or a scam.
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Romance scammers on Facebook will attempt to persuade their target to add them as a friend. They will do this by replying to the target’s comment using their fake accounts with messages similar to the one below.
Hello, I’m really much impressed about your profile and personality. I also admire your good sense of humor on here. I don’t normally write in the comment section, but I think you deserve this compliment… I’ll like to be your friend if you don’t mind send me a friend request. Thanks…
Such replies are designed to persuade a potential target on Facebook to add the scammer as a friend on Facebook, thus initiating the crux of the romance scam. The replies can differ to the example above, but are usually complimentary and always request a user send a friend request to the scammer. (The scammer doesn’t initiate the friend request since they will be targeting many different accounts at any one time, and initiating a high number of friend requests will likely get the scammer’s account restricted or removed.)
If a Facebook user does add the scammer as a friend, the scammer will begin a conversation over Facebook Messenger in an attempt to develop an online relationship which will result – as with all romance scams – in the scammer attempting to persuade the target to send money online.
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Comment spam is a rather brazen and public way of attempting to locate victims on social media. Scammers will often flock to any popular Facebook post that has lots of people commenting on it in order to reply to comments. Most of these romance scammers do appear to analyse the comments on a post in order to select victims (usually elderly people who are the opposite sex to the target.)
Frequently the fake Facebook accounts used by the scammers will use photos of soldiers, since military romance scammers often use comment spam to find victims.
In what is not a surprising turn of events, reporting these comments to Facebook rarely results in Facebook taking action. In all our testing and reports from our readers, Facebook claims that these offending comments do not violate their terms of service.
This means that for the time being, this type of romance scammer comment spam is here to stay and will likely only become more prolific.
To reiterate common security advice – never send money to people you’ve only met online. That is the catch-all advice to avoiding romance scams.
And on Facebook, you should always be extremely sceptical of replies made to your comments (or comments made to your public posts) that request you add them as a friend.
For more information on how romance scams work and how to avoid them, read our full post about romance scams here.
