Facebook Users Fall Victim to Social Empires Cheat Scam

Facebook games have amassed huge audiences with their broad, social appeal. However, among these expanding user bases are some more casual players who aren't necessarily the world's most tech-savvy people. Case in point, 135,000 players of the popular Facebook strategy game Social Empires have recently been scammed through a fake cheat according to Bitdefender's Hot for Security blog.
Finding the Marks
Like many in Facebook games, the economy of Social Empires, from Spanish developer Social Point, works by making its over six million monthly users wait or pay real money for the resources needed to proceed. The purposefully frustrating yet addicting mechanic controls the pace of play keeping players locked into the system. Knowing this, the scam entices players by offering maxed out food, gold, wood, stone and cash reserves. All they have to do is Like and spread the page by sharing it on other Facebook walls. It sounds like a steal, but the real theft is happening to the user.
After ensnaring someone new in its trap, the fraud's Blogspot domain then promotes itself through the victim's Facebook page. Meanwhile, the victim is redirected through an endless Hell of surveys, fake downloads, real malware downloads, horoscopes, palm readings, and imitation virus scans including fake versions of Bitdefender itself. Bianca Stanescu of Bitdefender notes that the fraud tellingly uses a three-year-old, woefully out of date version of their logo.
All of these sites then assault the user with constant questions trying to wring as much personal information out of them as they can. According to Stanescu, the fraudsters can read a computer's IP address to present pages in the appropriate language, and "they also try to lure people with what the scammers apparently believe are the victims' national interests."
The Killing Fields
Some may immediately recognize this cheat as the naked and easily avoidable attempt at identity theft that it is. However, when dealing with an audience as huge and popular as Facebook, there are enough vulnerable people unaware of the threat of thieves to make the scam worthwhile for the perpetrators. Security researchers like Andrew Conway of Cloudmark have explained how social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and text messaging present virtually infinite amounts of targets for even the most obvious hackers, spammers and scammers.
It's not just on social media though. Recently many Grand Theft Auto fans, another massive source of potential victims, fell for a scam offering a leaked version of the franchise's latest and greatest installment GTA V for the PC. While no such product has actually been announced yet, the game is currently only available for consoles, fans expecting 18 GB of the open-world crime simulator on their computers were instead fed 18 GB of pure malware courtesy of actual criminals.
So the security lesson here for gaming fans of all kinds is that if a cheat or download on the internet looks too good to be true it probably is. Just stick with the Konami code. That'll always be safe.