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Dislike: Facebook scammers latch onto anti-Like button calls

Thumbs-down suggestion leads to the roll-out of all the old familiar scams

Survey scammers have already capitalised on Facebook's tentative plans to develop a "Dislike" button.

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg conceded the obvious point that people didn't want to say they "liked" posts about friends' bad fortune, the only single button option available through the social network at present.

He acknowledged people wanted to express empathy and said that Facebook was working on a technology to allow people to do that quickly without "down-voting" content, the BBC reported.

He didn't actually say that Facebook was working on a "Dislike" button as such, but that's how his response during a Q+A session was widely reported.

Users have been requesting a "Dislike" button for years, to go with the "Like" button Facebook introduced in 2009. There's clearly a pent-up demand, a factor not lost on enterprising survey scammers. Invites to "early testing" of a Facebook Dislike app have sprung up on social media over recent days, Hackread reported.

In reality, no such app is yet available and the offers are a scam, designed to hoodwink people into filling in pointless online surveys or buying into get-rich-quick schemes. Survey scams are a well-worn short con on the internet that, at best, waste surfers' time while yielding nothing in return. Victims are not infrequently tricked into disclosing their mobile numbers through survey scams and are subsequently signed up to premium rate services.

Either ruse might also be used to coax marks into handing over Facebook login credentials.

More details on the resurgence of Facebook Dislike scams can be found in a blog post by security industry veteran Graham Cluley here, and by on Sophos's Naked Security blog here. ®

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