When I was checking Facebook this morning, I spotted some friends posting the same message all over their friends' walls. Well, another likejacking scam I assumed. So I did what I usually do when this happens, I wrote them a quick note telling them to clean up their Facebook apps and delete the wall posts. Nothing spectacular so far, as this happens on quite a regular basis. But wait...
Something's different this time: the whole scam is delivered in German! A really rare occurrence, but something which I expect to happen more often in future. “Why?” I hear you ask. Well, here's my theory:
About 70% of all Facebook users are based outside the US which means more than 350 million people, according to official Facebook statistics. These users don't speak English as their native language for the most part. For cybercriminals, this means that they miss the larger part of their target audience. Since most people in the world understand English, previous scams of this type worked out quite well, but they were also easy to spot outside the US and the UK, because it’s quite odd when people start writing messages in English when they usually don't. At the same time, likejacking scams have become better known among users of social networks. For these reasons the people behind the scams are doing what they started doing with spam years ago: they are localizing the content in different languages to broaden the target audience. While the messages in those days were heavily flawed in terms of language and design, the process with today’s social networks has been perfected much faster, as this example proves:
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