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Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) Plagued By A New Paid Access Scam


If your friends are posting status updates that say that Facebook Inc(NASDAQ:FB) will be charging membership fees, do not fall for it. It is a hoax.

The people over at anti-virus company, Sophos are warning people that this tired-and-true scam has come back to the scene the previous week and has multiplied widely across Facebook. This time, members are posting status updates that may be written in upper case, claiming that Facebook just released a price network for membership.

The message mentions that it would be $9.99 per month for gold membership, $6.99 per month for silver membership and $3.99 per month for bronze membership.

It goes on saying that when members subsequently log on, they will be notified for payment, unless they copy the message and post it on their walls. That will turn the color of the icon blue and Facebook will turn free. The message also mentions it is officially on news.

However, in reality, there is no such thing as price grid and membership. Facebook has no plans of charging its users for its service. As a general rule, if anyone reads anything on Facebook that seems to be funny or looks like a scam, it possibly is.

A similar hoax had come to surface late last year and made enough of an impact for Facebook to come forward and formally refuse it. The social networking site stated that it has no plans of charging its members.
A senior consultant at Sophos, Graham Cluley said that the gossip shows no signs of slowing down. A quick search of the popular social networking site shows that the hoax is still active. Cluely wrote in a blog post that the problem is how easy it is to share a message with online friends that people do it automatically. 

2 comments:

  1. Does anyone actually login to FB anymore and read their newsfeed? It's usually cluttered with garbage anyway. Last time I directly logged into FB was ages ago. Mostly just signin to other services with FB. Found that most of my real friends and I are staying in touch outside of FB these days. Guess FB has just become boring, as expected really. It's tough to have longevity on the web. I remember when Yahoo Chat was the coolest thing, when AOL was the place to be, when Friendster and MySpace meant something...FB is just one of those trends that has come and will eventually go...both because all people eventually get tired of the same old thing...but more importantly, as FB continues to morph into the invasive experience it now delivers, it will be a simple choice for the masses to jump ship and just go back to sharing the most important things with friends via email, txt, phone, in-person. So quickly we forget that true social interaction does not happen via FB. The lucky ones know that real connections are maintained outside of FB.

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  2. I didn't even know people still used Facebook. There is so much crap everywhere, I don't see how people are allowing a company to sell their personal information to companies who can sell them crap. Amazed.

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