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.

Sanford Wallace Indicted for hacking 500,000 Facebookers

One of the first figures to plaster the internet with millions of spam messages before being driven underground has been criminally charged for hacking some 500,000 Facebook accounts, stealing their personal information, and sending 27 million unwanted advertisements.

Sanford Wallace, now 43, first figured out a way to evade Facebook's spam filters and then employed a script that automatically logged in to the accounts he had compromised and retrieve a list of all the users' friends, according to an indictment filed Thursday in federal court in San Jose, California. He then allegedly posted junk messages on each of the friends' Facebook wall.

When people clicked on a link in the message, they were directed to a website that phished their name, and account credentials, prosecutors said. He allegedly carried out the scheme in just five months, starting in November 2008.

“Wallace continued his spamming scheme by storing the information provided by Facebook users, such as email addresses and passwords,” the indictment stated. “Wallace then used the user's email address and password to log into Facebook in order to continue to send spam messages.”

The indictment comes almost two years after Facebook was awarded $711m in damages from Wallace after suing him over the alleged scam. He faced a similar lawsuit from MySpace that in 2008 resulted in a $230m judgement. It's doubtful the company has recovered a dime of either judgement.

Wallace surrendered to FBI agents in Las Vegas on Thursday. He made his initial appearance in court a little while later and was released on $100,000 bail. He was ordered not to access Facebook or MySpace.

The indictment charges Wallace with six counts of fraud and two counts of intentional damage to a protected computer. He was also charged with two counts of criminal contempt for logging in to Facebook after the federal judge in the civil action brought by the site ordered him not to. One of the forbidden logins occurred while Wallace was aboard a Virgin Airlines flight from Las Vegas to New York.

If convicted, he faces a maximum of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each fraud count and 10 years and a $250,000 fine for each intentional damage count. Penalties for the contempt charges are up to the judge.