Anatomy Of A "Well Executed" Scam. You'll Die Laughing

I don't know how I landed up on that page, but here it was in all its glory - a site which was called "facebook news" and was trying to look it best like a facebook official page. A person who has surfed the net for just a month will probably be able to tell by looking at the url that this wasn't facebook, but probably they were banking upon the chance that the user won't see the url or probably won't be able to guess that this wasn't actually facebook.com.

First of all this funny MMO page had some testimonials, but we will come back to them later. When I chanced upon the page there was a message at the bottom of the page which read something like:

"ALL POSITIONS EXPECTED TO FILL UP IN 20 MINUTES 22 SECONDS"

 Okay, I understand, even a street vendor knows this facet of marketing - create urgency and scarcity. But still, 20 minutes? Really?

I got diverted and the ticker dutifully turned to 0 MINUTES 0 SECONDS. So far so good. Here is a capture of the thing.

and here's another....

However, as expected, a refresh of the page took us back in time and again the everything was okay. There were still 24 minutes before the seats get filled up.

The photograph of the happy family made me remember about all those advises about not putting up your family pics online. If I had to guess I'd say the "website owners" wouldn't have asked permission from this lovely couple, and the gentleman in fact was not Pradeep Bali. This aspect doesn't matter much though.

Again, let's take a look at the following text pic.

So, this brilliant, cutting edge website is the result of a collaboration between Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg? Brilliant!! I am really, really impressed ... and my stomach aches, because of how hard I've been laughing.

Okay, so we come back to the testimonials, here some words from Mark and Bill.

     




This pic alongside, without mentioning Facebook.com explicitly, says that Facebook is offering or creating jobs for people and those jobs consists of "posting links from comfort of their homes". All right.













The creators of such ... things... need some respects and well some well deserved WTF??????