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Stalker-like apps are the most widespread Facebook scams

According to BitDefender safego statistics, 34,7% of scams promise to offer users profile traffic insights.

BitDefender has released a detailed infographic which revealed the dynamics of the Facebook scam landscape.

Based on the statistics provided by Bitdefender safego, a free Bitdefender tool designed to protect social network accounts from privacy risks, e-threats and spam, the infographic details the types of messages used as baits in the spreading of social scam. The top ranking bait is of the ‘see who viewed your profile’ type and it lures users into finding out how many visitors their profiles have attracted.

The infographic also covers the most used spam words and phrases, thereby providing a very useful dictionary of social network malice. A separate section is dedicated to a spam wave case study, which offers valuable info on illegitimate applications' spreading mechanisms and potential click counts.

The geographic distribution of Facebook scam victims is illustrated under the form of a Top 5 of Busiest Scam Clicking countries. In addition to that, the ‘likejacking’ phenomenon, which has recently boomed back to the top, is also stripped down to its core mechanism so that users will be less likely to fall into this kind of traps.

"According to our statistics, stalker-like scams have collected approximately one million and a half clicks per wave. These figures help us find a possible explanation for the fact that these scams are increasingly cloned on other social platforms, such as Twitter," stated George Petre, BitDefender Threat Intelligence team leader.

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