Take this survey and win a free iPad! Take this survey and win a never-ending pasta bowl! Take this survey and get Facebook’s Dislike button! Wait, what?
Whenever a new product or service comes out, you can be certain that the scam artists will scurry out of the woodwork. One of their favourite tools are surveys that never deliver on the product they’re promising. As Snopes reports, the non-existent Facebook Dislike button is the latest in a long-established online tradition of Take This Survey™ scams. Con artists are now promising that if you take their survey, you’ll get special early access to the Dislike button.
Needless to say, don’t bother clicking on any banner ad or email alert you might see about Facebook’s new Dislike button. The link will likely take you to a page that looks a lot like Facebook, asking you to “activate” this newly introduced feature.
Dislike scam screenshot via Graham Cluley
And yes, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did hint at the possibility of releasing something akin to the Dislike button at some point in the near future. But it doesn’t exist yet.
The button probably won’t even be a Dislike button at all, but rather some kind of “sorry to hear about the death of your goldfish, bro” button. Well, not that. I’m sure Facebook’s marketing department will dream up something more solemn and concise.
“What [users] really want is the ability to express empathy,” Zuckerberg said last week. “Not every moment is a good moment.” You can say that again, Zuck. You can say that again.
The internet carnival barkers enticing you with Take This Survey howls usually just want your personal information. They can then turn around and sell that info en masse to shady companies who can’t afford expensive data mining software. Other times, the Take This Survey scam is just about infecting your computer.
From Snopes:
Each of the links was a version of a typical social media survey/sweepstakes scam, such as those that have used Kohl’s, Costco, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Kroger, Best Buy, Macy’s, Olive Garden, Publix, Target, and Walmart as bait by which scammers aimed to collect personal information and page likes from social media users (never delivering on their initial lofty promises once the desired information was collected from the marks).
Clicking on some shady email link is more likely to get you loaded up with a steaming pile of malware than anything close to a Dislike button. But tell me again about this never ending pasta bowl…
[Snopes and Graham Cluely]