The scummiest Facebook scam yet.
Posted: December 30th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Marketing | Tags: critical thinking, Facebook, hoax, scam | 1 Comment »Facebook scams usually rely on minor greed, like “insert big box store is giving away $1000 gift cards to every slob who can muster the effort to click like” (but no such lavish reward for their actual, in-store customers for some reason. Realistic, right?)
Scams aren’t just annoying proof of your *friend’s lack of critical thinking skills 
; sometimes they’re dangerous likejacking attempts (where you can’t see the thing you’re actually liking/sharing—potentially a virus.) They work because we trust our friends.
Which brings us to this stomach-churning hoax, “Little boy needs 100 shares for a free heart transplant”.
I mean, this scam doesn’t even make sense. How would shares benefit the hospital or donor who would pay for the supposed heart transplant? Do I need to point out they’d only get horrific PR from tying a kid’s life to “Facebook engagement”?
So, I mean, Google is your friend. Check if something’s fake. Was it Confucius, Jesus, or Elvis who said “All that glitters is not gold…?”
* I don’t blame my super kind-hearted friends for sharing this. I’ve retweeted fake amber alerts for missing kids before, because even though you know they’re probably fake, what if they aren’t? We all just wanna help.
