Facebook Scam: FREE Starbucks $50 / $25 Tim Hortons Gift Card

Facebook scammers are once again exploiting ignorant victims with claims of freebies. Anyone who likes coffee shops is a potential victim – whether you like to drink coffee, tea, or hot chocolate, chances are you wouldn’t mind doing so for free for the next few weeks.

This version says something along the lines of “FREE Starbucks $50 Gift Card” or “FREE $25 Tim Hortons Gift Card” followed by a link to a fraudulent website. It also has one of the following descriptions: “To celebrate our 40th Anniversary, we are giving away thousands of $50 Gift Vouchers FREE” or “To celebrate our birthday, we are giving away thousands of $25 Gift Vouchers FREE.”

I saw this scam start spreading over the weekend: some of my fellow Canadian friends were eager to get a free gift card to Tim Hortons (sometimes affectionately referred to as Timmies). Then the scam expanded to include Starbucks, which has locations both in Canada and the US.

Similar to previous Facebook scams, you need to share the link with your Facebook friends before proceeding. The webpage in question tells you this is necessary to get the free voucher.

The scammers’ goal is to drive more traffic towards certain sites. This is how the scammer earns his or her money: a commission for every survey completed, every product purchased, and/or every account compromised. They also use them to spread malware and obtain personal information.

As I've always said, if you see a scam like this one, report it. Then go check your own Wall to make sure you’re not spreading the scam; the sooner you clean it up and unlike the page, the better. You can even contact Facebook Security if you’d like to.

Twitter Faces Threat from Scammers

Scammers are using compromised Twitter accounts to prey on suspecting victims, security firm Sophos is reporting today.

According to the firm, compromised Twitter accounts are sending out tweets and direct messages to followers, urging them to sign up for a site that will help them make some money. One such message from an account reads, "I made $888 today check out how I made it." The message is followed by a link to a malicious site.

According to Sophos, the dollar amount in the tweets and messages can vary.

Sophos says that when users click on the included link, they will be brought to a site that claims to help single mothers and teenagers make "thousands of dollars" each day. However, those who fall prey to the scam will only "end up out of pocket" if they sign up, Sophos said.

As Barracuda Networks revealed earlier this year at the RSA security conference, Twitter has proven appealing to scammers because of its functionality both as a social network and search engine. And the worst part is, many of the site's malicious accounts are more popular than you might think.

Barracuda pointed to one Twitter account, called Download-Heaven, which had 445 followers recently, even though it directed folks to hosted shareware containing malware and Trojans. What's more, the company found in its research of Twitter that just 43 percent of users were considered legitimate. The remaining 57 percent of users were "questionable."

Over a five-month period, Barracuda found 34,627 samples of malware in search engines and on Twitter. According to the research firm, Twitter accounted for 8 percent of that total.

"It's interesting, because we've been doing this work for probably nine months of a year now, and the last time we really examined it and looked back on this, it charted very differently," Barracuda Networks chief research officer Paul Judge said earlier this year. "About 69 percent of the malware that we found was on Google at the time, only 1 percent was on Twitter."

But Twitter hasn't just sat still. The social network last year launched a filtering service that aims at stopping malicious links from being included in direct messages. The company's link-shortening service, t.co, also helps to safeguard users from malicious links.

According to Sophos, keeping safe from the latest threat is quite simple: don't click on the link in the direct message or tweet. Users who have had their accounts compromised should reset their passwords. Sophos also recommends those folks scan their computers for malware.