Are you being scammed by Facebook ads?

I've written a bit lately about how cyberthieves using social media to scam people. It turns out the most egregious scammers are many "legitimate" companies that run deceptive ads on these networks.

TechCrunch has a fascinating series on how advertisers are using social games to trick Facebook and MySpace users into forking over personal information or signing up for recurring subscriptions they don't want.

[ InfoWorld's Robert X. Cringely sets his sights on one of the oldest and most persistent online scams in "Why can't we do anything about spam?" | Tune in to the InfoWorld Security Central channel for the latest IT security news and reviews. ]

It starts with stupid-yet-addictive quizzes and games like FarmVille, Mafia Family Wars, and Mobsters. The games themselves are free, but if you want to advance faster than your friends, you'll probably have to buy virtual objects using real money. Per BusinessWeek:

Zynga doesn't charge users to play FarmVille, but it does sell digital crops, cattle, and farmland. Corn seed, for instance, goes for the equivalent of 10 cents; cows run 20 cents each. All those digital goods add up. Zynga pulls in its nine-figure annual revenues from FarmVille and 20 other games....One recent success: digital sweet potato seeds that cost $5 a packet. The seeds, which of course cost nothing to duplicate, pulled in more than $400,000 in three days.

Don't have $5 to spend on a bag of imaginary seeds? You can get $450 in Farm Cash by clicking an ad and signing up to receive a "free learning CD" from Video Professor. Of course, the "free" offer comes with caveats; if you don't cancel in time, you'll pony up $190 for an entire learning series.

Per TechCrunch's Michael Arrington:

A typical scam: users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey. Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they've done that, they've just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription.

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