Reuters Money

If you spend any time on Facebook, you’ve probably seen some of the many scams directed at users.

It’s simple: You are an obvious target if you are on Facebook. Being part of the world’s largest social network makes you extra vulnerable to scammers because it is a social network, and clicking on and joining things is part of the game.

The scams take many forms. It can be a game that one of your friends supposedly asked you to play, a photograph that you were told you must look at or even an image of yourself that you’re told is in someone else’s photo album. Others appear to be part of big company giveaways, like one that purported to be from IKEA. Tens of thousands of people often fall for these scams, leaving their names and faces on the phony pages because they thought they were going to get something if they did.

The scams sometimes simply seek to annoy users, while many more are far darker — aimed at gaining access to the significant amount of personal information that many users post for only their friends to see. Users are also sometimes induced into downloading malicious software. Many of the scams can lead to identity theft.

Irked that Facebook isn’t more aggressive when it comes to scam prevention, some users have built well-followed Facebook pages that warn about scams. At least two of those pages — Scam Sniper and The Bulldog Estate — were disabled this week for alleged terms-of-service violations.

Scam Sniper was taken down for half a day and Bulldog Estate was knocked out for more than three days.

“As of now, the fans of my page, Scam Sniper, feel betrayed by Facebook,” said Joshua Brunson, who runs Scam Sniper. “They feel scam artists are given room to do whatever they like. This feeling has been fortified over the last few days due to the fact that Facebook seems to react swiftly to remove sites like Scam Sniper or The Bulldog Estate based on ‘terms violations,’ but leave scam pages, apps, groups and pedophiles to stay on the network as long as they like.”

The outrage was immediate. Fans were still able to post comments and they collected rapidly — nearly 200 posted to the Scam Sniper page. After security consultant Graham Cluley, who writes the Naked Security blog for UK-based Sophos, wrote about the situation, Bulldog Estate was reinstated. Scam Sniper had come back online before that.

“There’s a huge problem with scams, rogue applications and attacks on Facebook,” Cluley said. “It’s become a real hotbed of cybercrime, and we get more reports from Facebook users of threats than any other place on the Internet.”

He said it doesn’t make much sense for Facebook to target pages like those that actually are helpful.

“Shutting down sites which try to educate Facebook users about these threats seems highly counter-productive,” he said. “It would be better if Facebook did a better job of stamping out the threats, and securing its users, than closing down those who are trying to make it a safer place.”

Facebook wouldn’t specifically discuss the pages and what had happened. Instead, a Facebook spokesman, who asked that he be identified as just that, said the company does aggressively try to protect users.

“Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and scams is a top priority for us,” the spokesman said. “Applications and pages that attempt to trick people into taking a certain action or spamming their friends violate our policies, and we have a large team of professional investigators who quickly remove these when we detect them or when they’re reported to us by our users. We’re working on ways to automate the flagging of these scams so we can take action on them even more quickly.”

Facebook does have several pages that provide information on scams and scam prevention, including one dedicated solely to security issues. But users have complained, as Brunson has, that Facebook — which is all about social engagement — is disengaged and, well, anti-social. There is no dialogue and the company mostly uses its forums to say it is doing something, but not doing what Scam Sniper, Bulldog Estate and others do: Point out specific threats.

Bulldog Estate and its creator Tony Mazan work closely with Brunson and Scam Sniper, which has collected close to 8,000 fans over the past year or so.

After being unable to work on his page for most of the week, Mazan received a one-paragraph apology from Facebook saying that his page had been “disabled in error.”

Fans of the page — and of Scam Sniper — were relieved the pages were working again, but that did nothing to slow the ire directed at Facebook and to further the conversation about why scams are proliferating.

Brunson said Facebook isn’t doing all that it can do protect its users.

“I felt it was my duty as a responsible Facebook user to at least offer what I feel Facebook is not,” he said. “My page is not designed to badmouth Facebook in any way, but rather to help support the many users who are tired of having to deal with the spam on the network all by themselves.”

He credits Facebook with taking some steps, but said it needs to be more open and forthcoming about the problem.

Scam Sniper and Bulldog Estate are volunteer efforts by the page owners, who said they don’t know why Facebook would take the action it did.

“I don’t know whether scam artists caused this Facebook action or whether Facebook simple feels scam hunting pages on its network are bad press,” Brunson said.

He cited the recent burst of photo tagging spam as an example of Facebook’s inability to stop an obvious problem. Even when one rogue app is shut by Facebook, he said, a new one appears immediately afterward.