Hurricane Irene Scam Hits Facebook

Hurricane Irene surely turned New York City to “city that never sleeps” as it brought flood waters, knocked out power to more than 4 million people and was even responsible for at least 15 deaths in six states.
What’s worse is that cybercriminals are taking advantage of the incident by spamming a fake video on Facebook.

The page, which contains the alarming title “VIDEO SHOCK – Hurricane Irene New York kills All” displays a clickable image of a fake video player on the page.

The text displayed in the succeeding pages is in Italian, which suggests that the attack specifically targets Italian users. Clicking the image of the video displays a prompt that says “Per Vedere il video devi prima condividere” which translates to “To see the video you must first share”, as well as two options that say “Share” and “See the video”.


Clicking “Share” displays the link to the Facebook on the user’s wall.


On the other hand, clicking “See the video” displays a list of deals that the user must register to, in order to view the video.


The said deals only lead to advertisement and affiliate program websites.
Such schemes in Facebook have been rampant in the past weeks, as we’ve seen such scams that lead to spam pages or surveys. We’ve seen these attacks use various social engineering lures, such as false news about the death of of singer Lady Gaga, tickets for the Twilight movie, Breaking Dawn, and invites for Google+.

For more information on threats found in social networks such as Facebook, check our report: Spam, Scams and Other Social Media Threats, and our infograph, The Geography of Social Media Threats.