To see the ongoing conversation about aggressive online advertising is both reassuring as well as disconcerting. The reason that it’s disconcerting is that Mike Arrington has just begun to breach a much greater issue by randomly attacking one (or a couple) companies in this space. If this attack was done just for page views then writing about the issues are almost as bad as the people performing the act.
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Back in June I wrote about a ruling against Sanford Wallace, who is one of the most well known spammers. As of today, the case as been settled and “California awarded Facebook $711 million in damages against Sanford Wallace”. Additionally, Wallace now faces possible jail time. Despite the massive settlement, it’s unlikely Wallace will ever show up in California again, or pay the settlement.
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vKontakte, the Russian clone of Facebook, recently went international by translating the site into 22 languages. The only challenge now is for the company to get the same sort of international brand recognition that Facebook has obtained. With Facebook’s current dominance it is unlikely that vKontakte will get the same type of recognition, however that’s not stopping them from trying. The latest campaign I’ve seen took place in the comments of our blog.
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Remember the beginning of the end for MySpace? It was all those random “cute girls” that were friending you even though you didn’t know them. You would log in and there would be 10 friend requests from fake friends. Well, it appears that scammers are trying to do a similar thing on Facebook, which until now was extremely difficult for scammers to penetrate. This new attack attempts to get users to click on a spyware site.
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A new Facebook Connect application has spread quickly around the Facebook social graph by tagging all of a user’s friends who have the same zodiac sign. This is the latest in a series of new photo tagging applications which have been spreading like wildfire across the site. The Facebook platform lets users easily tag their friends but by prompting users for unrestricted posting and unrestricted photo upload permissions, the application is able to spread like crazy. It leads me to wonder whether Facebook will begin cracking down on these types of apps.
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Today Facebook obtained a ruling against noted spammer, Sanford Wallace. While a formal ruling has not been posted yet, Facebook has told us that “Judge Fogel agreed that there were grounds for criminal contempt and that the US Attorneys office should investigate Wallace. Wallace filed for bankruptcy, which is not unexpected and only delays our judgment temporarily.” It’s not surprising to see one of the more well known spammers bankrupt.
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The Facebook phishing scams have continued over the Memorial Day weekend, although it appears Facebook is slowly winning the battle. The latest versions of the scams have used Tinyurls and improperly placed spaces to defeat Facebook’s spam filters. One message I received in the past few minutes simply stated “n u d z . r u”.
While it’s unknown if recipients are following the improperly formed URLs, the spammers are clearly turning to alternative tactics. While the volume has appeared to increase, the new spam messages are not great phishing bait. Rather than luring more victims, the spammers are simply helping Facebook to improve their anti-spam measures.
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Facebook phishing scams won’t seem to go away. Today a new scam appears to be spreading through people’s Facebook inboxes: areps.at. It’s another obscure URL and it’s just like all the other ones that have been spreading around the site. As soon as you login to the site, it will steal your email and password and then log you into Facebook. Within a short period of time the system will automatically switch your password and block you from the site.
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Over the past few weeks I have been getting countless emails from users that have been increasingly prompted to fill out captcha forms when submitting wall posts and updating statuses. The reason for the increase is most likely because Facebook is trying to contain spammers. Unfortunately it’s making it more challenging for users to interact with the site.
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Despite an $873 million award after winning a spam suit a couple weeks ago, Facebook and users on the site are still becoming victims of aggressive spammers. Ingrid Alongi says that she has received two spam emails from separate friends within a couple hours today. A number of other people have been commenting around the web about a rise in spam.
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