A photo is circulating Facebook that apparently shows a baby with “arm cancer” who needs money for surgery. The post claims that likes, shares and comments on the post will result in donations being made for that surgery.
An example of the post can be seen below –
This little baby has Arm cancer and he need money for surgery
Facebook has decided to help by giving
1 Like = 2 dollars . 1 Comment = 4 dollars . 1 Share = 8 dollars
,
Please dont scroll down without typing Ameen 😢 —
At the time of writing, the post has accumulated over 350,000 shares on Facebook.
This is yet another example of callous like-farming, a subject that we often find ourselves dealing with yet a problem that certainly refuses to go away. Like-farming is the process spammers use to lure Facebook users into liking and sharing posts on Facebook using either exploitation or deception, or both. In this case, spammers are claiming that engagement with the Facebook post will result in donations for life-saving surgey, and this is false.
This is simply a ploy to exploit and deceive people into engaging with a Facebook post. No one donates money for life-saving surgery conditioned on the engagement on a Facebook post. The photo of the child – who does indeed have a tumour – was stolen from elsewhere on the Internet and used as bait for this like-farming scam.
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Facebook pages publish these unscrupulous posts because they want to attract followers. When like-farming Facebook posts go viral across the social networking site, the Facebook posts pick up lots of followers. These followers can then be exposed to all types of scams, or the Facebook posts can be sold off to marketing companies.
We’ve been warning about these types of scams for years, and Facebook has persistently shown little interest in removing them, with many able to garner many hundreds of thousands – if not millions of shares. This means it’s up to us – the Facebook users – to ensure these posts do not get the viral reach the crave.
So once again we urge our readers to get the word out. Don’t engage with these posts. Report them (which will almost certainly have little impact) but do not comment on them, share them or like them.
Read our article on this type of like-farming here.
