Computer and Software Support


Will donate money for every share scam

There are people out there that will use a person's sympathy to take advantage of the person. These people make me sick. The spammers and hackers know that there is at least two categories of people that they can target. The two categories are

  • Get rich or get things for free category

  • The truly caring people

The people that are quick to find money or free items are easy targets for get rich or free scams. You have seen these scams in email. Majority of people from one time or another got an email stating the president of a country has been overrun and he must hide his money. If you will let him put his money in your bank account, you can have some of it. When you give him your bank account info, your money disappears. There are some that are so anxious to get money or something for free that they won't think about what the dangers are.

The people that care will respond from their heart and not think about the request that they are getting. These people are easy to lure in. There is nothing wrong with these people. They just care and it is easy to jump in with both feet for something that appears to be for a good cause.

These scams have been circulating in email for years. Some of the email scams are as follows

  • Microsoft will give a free laptop to everyone that forwards the email so many times

  • Diabetes foundation (or some other non profit) will donate $1 to the diabetes cure for every time the email is forwarded.

  • and many other versions

Now with Facebook

Now that we have Facebook, the scams are circulating around Facebook. Here is one of many examples

   

People see this and their heart goes out to the child. I know mine does. They then see the message that Facebook will donate money for ever share and they think that is cool and click on it. Facebook would go bankrupt if they actually did this. The above picture is only one of many circulating Facebook. My heart goes out to these kids. However the person that starts the share is doing it for greed or some other wrong reason and not for the child. The people that sees it and shares it are caring people that doesn't know better or so caught up with the sadness that they don't think about the reason it was posted.

When you share the photo, it includes your name in the list of people that has shared the photo. Everyone that gets the photo will see your name and everyone else's on it. As shown in the following picture

   

A spammer will use those names to spam your account or sell the list to others.

Email scams work the same way. People forward emails and they don't use blind copy. Before you know it tons of people's email addresses are available to anyone that sees it and spammers get them.

By the way, your name shows up on anything you have shared.

Here is another share scam that was going around Facebook

I have submitted a suggestion to Facebook that they should prevent your name from showing. The share can give how many people has shared it but does not show your name. If you have a Facebook account and like this suggestion, please go to Facebook's help page and suggest this. If we get enough people suggesting it, they may use the idea.

To make the suggestion go to the suggestion page on Facebook or click here

You can paste the following in there and click submit

When I click share on an item or click like, I do not want my name shared with everyone for my safety. Please change the sharing and likes to show only the number of people that has shared or liked it but doesn't share the user's name. This would protect me from scams. Thank you!

Thanks Kathy for the above suggestion.

By not showing your name, it will protect you and you can click share as much as you want.

For information on other scams on Facebook, click here

For help or information on using Facebook, click here

As mentioned above there are several going around Facebook. If organizations donated to everyone, they would go broke.

 Here is another.

   

Here is another one.

   

Here is another one

   

Here is another similar to the one above

   

There is a page on Facebook to inform people of scams called Stop Facebook Spam and Scams. Feel free to visit and join. It will help protect you. It is free to join and be a member of the group. To get to the group either do a search for Stop Facebook Spam and Scams or click here.

Thanks goes to Kevin Gress for this Facebook page.