‘Like-farming’ a common scam on Facebook
By Kim Komando, USA Today
Facebook has changed the way people do a lot of things online. For example, you probably notice yourself reflexively clicking ‘like’ on anything your friends post on Facebook, even if it’s just to acknowledge you saw it. Scammers are taking advantage of that reflex for a dangerous scam called “like-farming.”
What is like-farming?
Like-farming is when scammers post an attention-grabbing story on Facebook for the express purpose of cultivating likes and shares. Based on the way Facebook works, the more likes and shares a post has, the more likely it is to show up in people’s News Feeds.
This gives the scammer more eyeballs for posts that trick people out of information or send them to malicious downloads. The big question, of course, is why Facebook doesn’t stop these posts before they get too big. And that’s where the real scam comes in.