Old and New Phishing Scams

By now we have all seen this post.  There have been and will be many more like it.  Most are obvious fakes.  We know how stingy Zynga is so don't believe they would give anybody 1000 rewards points for free.  You may think that because the message came from one of your friends that its ok.  Your friend did not send you the message.  He clicked on the post and his account was compromised enabling the phisher, spammer, hacker people to send messages on his behalf.  I often go to the profile of the sender and will see they made a post telling their friends not to open up any messages from them.  Once you realize your account was compromised, change your password, clear you cache, restart your computer and be more careful about clicking on links.  Here is a guy in my mafia who I will call Curious George.  His phisers made 2 posts for him. Curious George now knows about this and I read the comments he made on his wall.  He is not happy.  Here is some of what he had to say about it:

"WARNING!!!! This message is a spam, scam crappy virus thingy. DO NOT USE THIS GUYS"./Curious George

The first one is easy to ignore.  The second one concerns me because it looks official.  On occasion Zynga will throw us a bone and give us 1-5 reward points for clicking on a link.  This post has a short link and just claims to be a reward.  Always examine the url.  All the shortened ones from Zynga will start with http://zyn.ga/.  The Mafia Wars Icon means nothing.  It's just used as a tool to trick us into clicking on the link.  The phisher people are not concerned about copyright infringement citations.  Anybody can copy and past the Mafia Wars Icon.  I don't know much about computers and even I was able to make one of these.

My friend Marios Prodromou, creator of The Mafia Wars Players Versus Zynga  was nice enough to send the following links and commentary.  Simply click on them to block some of the known scamming applications.  Thanks Marios.  Check out his group, it has a lot of insightful information regarding the injustices many of us feel Zynga has imposed.

1) Mafia Wars Anniversary Bonus - the gold treasure chest that says: 1K MW anniversary gift - but MISSPELLS anniversary. QUITE STUPID IF YOU ASK ME You can block it here:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/block.php?id=130680230285348&action=block

2) Mafia Wars Secret Items this one is bogus also. You can block it here:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/block.php?id=130287246982885&action=block

3) Mafia Wars Free Boosts this one is bogus also. You can block it here:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/block.php?id=116014228438563&action=block