Criminals Monetize Facebook as Marketers Struggle

A major challenge currently facing internet marketers is how to best monetize popular social network sites. As marketers deal with complex issues of targeted marketing and privacy they are under pressure to devise a method to extract advertising value from some of the most visited sites on the internet. The answers are not obvious and will require creativity and ingenuity. Another equally ambitious and creative group has created their own solution to the monetization conundrum, it’s just not legal. Internet criminals have often been in front of the security frontier creating methods to beat internet security measures and take people’s money. Recently, a Seattle man’s Facebook friends fell victim to a scam that revolved around using Facebook to directly contact his friends and solicit money to help him return home after he was mugged while on vacation in London. Obviously he was not in London, but before his friends knew that they had been taken for thousands of dollars. The lesson learned here could be that we cannot let our guard down on the internet, even if we are on a trusted site like Facebook. If someone asks you for money on the internet, it’s almost always a scam.

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