Facebook and the state of Washington are suing an ad network they accuse of encouraging people to spread spam through clickjacking schemes and other tactics.
The company at the centre of the allegations, Adscend Media, denies the charges and said it will fight them vigorously. According to the office of Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna, the company paid and encouraged scammers to design Facebook pages to bait users into visiting Websites that pay the company. The bait pages would appear in posts that seem to originate from a person’s Facebook friends and offer visitors an opportunity to view “provocative” content in exchange for clicking the ‘like’ button on the Facebook page.
By clicking like
, the user alerts their Facebook friends to the page. From there, the user was directed to complete one of several online surveys and provide information such as their age. Oftentimes, the promised content did not exist, and the duped user was directed off Facebook through a series of prompts that took them to unrelated Websites. In some cases, clickjacking was used to activate the like
function and spread spam, according to the state’s suit — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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