Osama Bin Laden Scams Hit Facebook

As already reported earlier this week, scammers immediately began taking advantage of the news that the US recently conducted a raid to kill 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Just like with previous scams, they are leveraging Facebook with sensational headlines to target ignorant victims.
There is, however, a curious new type of scam in addition to the one I already covered. This version says something along the lines of “Watch the Osama Shoot down video” or “Osama Dead – Censored Video Leaked” followed by a link. According to Sophos, it even has the description of “Osama is dead, watch this exclusive CNN video which was censored by Obama Administration due to level of violence, a must watch. Leaked by Wikileaks.”

Once again, instead of the supposed shocking video you are instead presented with a survey which you are told you must complete before you can go any further. This is how the scammer earns his or her money: a commission for every survey completed.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Instead of asking you to merely Like the page or share the link with your Facebook friends, the scammers trick you into cutting-and-pasting a line of JavaScript into your web browser’s address bar.

The user does not realize that just like with previous Facebook scams, sharing the link with others just helps spread it further across the social network. As far as they’re concerned, they are just following a sequence of instructions and keyboard presses to watch the video.

It’s very interesting that scamm