I have found something interesting information that if you are a facebook user you will have seen at times viral links such as “Click this if you hate Cancer” or “Click this picture and see what happens”. This does nothing but make cyber-scammers (love that word, sounds straight out of James Bond) rich.
Once the pages have collected a huge number of “Likes” they are then sold, for cash, to other businesses who use them to make their page appear more popular.
Posts with images such as “Like if you can see the tiger” are used to build “Likes” and “comments”.
Once a page has collected thousands of these, it will appear higher in people´s News Feeds on Facebook. “Likes” are like the currency of the site, as it were.
Pages with 100,000 Likes can be sold for 200 US$ according to a search-engine expert.
Within 3 days a post like this can have 70,000 likes and someone somewhere is about to make a nice little profit by selling the page to a business wanting some quick wins. The buyer changes the page details and has an instant fan page with a big following, a lot of likes and an in depth “edge rank”. An “edge rank” is the score your profile is given that dictates how your page interacts with other profiles on Facebook.
Facebook and Twitter are increasingly being targeted for scams, as people feel trust whilst socialising with their friends online. People are much more likely to click on a link shared by a friend and this inherent trust is something ruthless people prey on. Over the past 10 years, there has been incredible growth in the amount of personal information people will voluntarily shares and cyber criminals “follow the money” by creating scams specifically targeted at social networks.
So be careful, think about what you click to Like. I am not saying don´t click to Like businesses like ours that you know as this is how you receive handy updates, but think about “Liking” pages of cartoons and photos carefully.