We know. Joe and Christina “liked” it and they’re both smart folks, so it’s got to be real, right? Wrong.
For the sake of all of our sanity and humanity in general, we took a peek behind the “like” scams making their way around Facebook and we can tell you right now – the American dude doesn’t deserve to get stoned to death and all the little girl found in her Happy Meal was mechanically separated, genetically modified chicken and high fructose corn syrup.
There are a bunch of these scams out there and at the end of each tunnel, there’s nothing but aggravation for your friends who have to watch their otherwise brilliant buddies be fooled into automatically posting this spam for all the world to see. Take a look:
So you won’t have to, we clicked. This is what we saw for the Happy Meal girl:
It’s a terribly mocked-up version of a Facebook page that seems to get the color and shape just right enough for people to ignore how bad it is and click on the video. The thing is, the entire video is simply a linked image, as is most of the page.
Just to feed your curiosity, here’s the “American guy” that should be stoned to death:
The end is the same, no matter what one you examine – a post to your wall saying you like it and that’s it. There is no video. Right-clicking on the page brings up a dialog box offering for you to sell your Facebook Fan page.
The funny thing is, these pages are just that – self propogating bits of annoying. The entire operation appears to be a scam to build the popularity of these domains before selling them off to likely make your digital life that much more aggravating in the long run. So don’t click.
This isn’t the first we’ve seen of unsavory types trying to take advantage of Facebook’s “like” button. Last June, Sarah Perez wrote about “like-jacking”, or the act of fooling users into liking things other than what they thought they were liking.
In the future, just ask yourself before you click: Does it have multiple exclamation points? Is half or more of it in all CAPITAL LETTERS? Do they want you to “CLICK HERE TO SEE!”? It’s likely a scam. And don’t worry. There’s no single video out there that could actually make all you SMS fiends stop text messaging. Just know that from the start.
