If Gazette-Mail readers look at the online version of reporter Ashley Perham’s story about a South ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä man facing federal charges and a lawsuit over an alleged real estate scam, they’ll find something odd and, yet, all-too-common in the comments section.
Three comments occupy that space as of this writing, and none of them have anything to do with the article. Instead, the commenters promote a remote work opportunity offering insane money with little to no effort.
The first comes from a woman who claims to have earned more than $21,000 in a month just for working three to four hours a day on a laptop. The second comment is nearly identical, even claiming to have hit the exact same earnings mark, even though it’s from a different “person.†The third claims to be from a mom of two kids who is making around $500 an hour and “it’s so easy.â€
Each comment has a link, and though each link appears to offer a unique web address, they all go to the same website, operating under the name “Finance Reports.†Best not to click on the links at all, but, if one does, they’ll find the website offers the same thing the comment posts advertise: a work-from-home opportunity marketed especially toward moms of young children who could really use a financial boost with no financial commitment.
Cutting to the chase, the company actually will likely seek a monetary registration fee, and a lot of personal information. Basically, it’s a phishing scam, and it could lead to anything from scammers setting up a clone, or “spoof,†of a real person’s social media profile to electronically accessing the individual’s bank account.
These lures in the Gazette-Mail comment section actually aren’t anything new. But seeing three of them stacked on top of each other at the bottom of a news story about federal prosecution of an alleged financial scam offered a level of irony too rich to ignore. (Along with an opportunity to, hopefully, warn anyone who thinks these things are real against clicking on them.)
Readers have to log in to Facebook to leave a comment on an online Gazette-Mail article. Plenty of other newspapers use this approach. Unfortunately, Facebook is rife with spam bots that swarm comment sections. The bots have a variety of program functions that can activate them: It could be certain words or phrases in an article, a certain number of page views, or where the article shows up or is shared beyond the Gazette-Mail website, that prompts them to automatically comment.
Now, there are several things about these particular scam posts that should make it fairly obvious that they’re not legit. The Facebook profiles are hastily thrown together and most likely won’t purport to come from anyone the reader actually knows. They’re also usually very poorly written, random punctuation or capitalized words. These particular Facebook phishing bots aren’t exactly polished when it comes to impersonating humans (although grammar and punctuation online isn’t exactly error free, even from the best of the language police). Then there’s the most obvious thing: the amount of money promised.
Making $500 an hour? Banking $21,000 a month? For three to four hours of work a day? Sure, there might be a way to make that much money in that little time from a laptop, if one is a criminal hacker or participating in the digital age’s version of the world’s oldest profession. However, it’s not going to happen working from home doing whatever it is this fake company claims to want to hire people to do (which is seemingly never made quite clear).
These crude bots aren’t constrained to Facebook. Indeed, they can be found across multiple social media and entertainment platforms that have comment sections. And there are other permutations. Some X (formerly Twitter) users might notice that an account belonging to the kind, elderly woman who offers home gardening tips is suddenly posting every 30 seconds about getting aboard the crypto-currency rocket express and urging her followers to do the same. No, the nice woman hasn’t snapped. She got hacked. Do not follow her fever-dream crypto craze. This one also happens across various platforms, but was particularly bad on Elon Musk’s broken social media machine not too long ago.
While some of these efforts can be laughable in an irritating sort of way, one wonders how these baited traps will evolve as chatbots and other artificial intelligence programs improve. The bottom line, as always, is to be vigilant and cautious.
