The 3G Dating Agency’s Blog

At TechCrunch Dennis Yu gives an insider’s perspective on the various scams which provide substantial advertising revenues for online social networks whilst conning vulnerable members of their communities by stealing their personal information, selling it on and using it to spam them.

The key to the scammers trick is to access profile data and one of the most common and easy ways is via apps:

“In June 2007, Facebook opened up their application developer platform so that anyone could build games on top of the social network. By having access to user data, game developers could instantly make engaging, viral games. Rate who is hottest among your friends, share quizzes, race cars, grow vegetables, and so forth – all with a click of a button. Users in one click gave the game permission to access their profile data and they didn’t think twice about it. Facebook hadn’t consider what was possible when the game developer passed on user name, profile picture, and personal details on to an advertiser and the kind of deceptive ads that were possible“

The scammers really started rocking and rolling once they began dynamically inserting personal user data into the adverts that the app was serving. Such clever ad copy made it nearly impossible to distinguish an ad from a component of the application. For the social network catching and enforcing those breaching advertiser policy was next to impossible as most developers were college kids and by early 2008 platforms like facebook were generating 400 million impressions a day, as users began poking, biting, slapping, kissing and drop-kicking each other. What’s more the advertisers were paying facebook and helping the company pay its hosting costs and increase it’s valuation.

“I finally came to this realization: People on Facebook won’t pay for anything. They don’t have credit cards, they don’t want credit cards, and they are not interested in shopping. But you can trick them into doing one of three things:
#1 Download a toolbar: It could be spyware (such as Zango) or something more legitimate, such as Webfetti or Zwinkys.
#2 Give up their email address: You’ve won a “free” camera or perhaps you’ve been selected as a tester for a new Macbook Pro (which you get to keep at the end of the test). Just tell us where you want us to ship it.
#3 Give up their phone number: You took the IQ Quiz, so give us your phone number and we’ll tell you your score. Never mind that you’ll get billed $20 a month or perhaps be tricked into inviting 10 other friends to beat your score.”

Method #3, getting their phone number, has been the most lucrative thing on Facebook, even more than the fake weight loss offers, for the last 2 years“

Read the full story to hear about how this all naturally leads to “ad networks showing personal data on landing pages”, “Cloaking: Where advertisers show different pages based on IP address (geo-blocking northern California helped them avoid showing their spammy ads to Facebook employees)”, “Weak enforcement: when platforms allow a laissez-faire economy stepping in only when the violations were so egregious that their call centers are getting flooded with complaints”, “virtual currency scams: that scam advertisers who are paying for leads by incentivizing users to complete offers for Netflix, Credit Cards, AutoInsurance etc in order to get points”, “Trickery is profitable: Fool users into thinking the new friend request is from Facebook, lie to them that the miracle skin crème is actually free, tell them they’ll earn points if they just click this button – which then puts their email address on a list that’s resold to the top spammers in the world”

So in summary… “the most lucrative thing on facebook” = “getting their phone number”.

Problem is that when you take this into the mobile community domain you not only get a phone number but also access to the inbuilt payment method (eg. premium SMS, Payforit etc) and if you’re an operator you also get customer service calls – which will damage customer trust and cost you more than $40 each. Mobile Communities clearly need another way to be funded because advertising scammers are too sophisticated, controls are too expensive to support, and a browser with a 3 inch screen can’t give protection for customers wallets.

I wonder how long it’s going to take mobile operators to wake up to this reality?