Firstly, the man who brought us Walker Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris is alive. A link to a video that claiming to shed light on the supposed death of the action movie and series star at 71 years old has hit Facebook users hard with an epidemic-like survey scam.
”Chuck Norris isn’t dead, and the messages point to an all-too-familiar survey scam.” commented Senior technology consultant at Sophos, Graham Culley. (Sophos is an international developer and vendor of security software and hardware including anti-spyware, anti-virus & anti-spam)
The text of the wall post is as follows:
[video] Chuck Norris dies at age 71! Not a Joke. – www.worldnews77551.com – See the video to find out how he died. News today of Chuck Norris death at age 71 has been met with confusion and humour, but sadly it is true.
Here’s how the wall-post looks like:
Those interested Facebook users that have been coerced into following the link are guided to an external web site where they are offers for a chance at winning large prizes such as a new Sony TV or Apple Ipad 2 tablet in exchange for…(wait for it)…taking a survey.
Another route the scam can go is to ask you to install a “premium YouTube plugin” to your broweser. Obviously no such thing exists and it’s just a way for the scammers to try and make you install their rogue plugin that potentially could be a key-logger or something that will install a virus on your computer.
Culley explained, “In my case, I was taken to a website claiming to offer a free £100 Starbucks card. (I don’t drink coffee, so I wasn’t tempted to hand over my personal contact information and date of birth),”
Cyber-criminals in operation behind a scam like this want to make money from traffic to these external sites and from gaining people’s details such as their email address. This scam works in the same way as the wooow now I have seen how many hours I spend on Facebook scam that many have fallen prey to in the same way recently.
If you’ve fallen for the scam then delete all traces of it to prevent it from spreading further, and be more careful in future. If you think your account might have been hacked then change your password immediately.