These communities are predicated on a certain level of trust. Our students, though very knowledgeable about using technology, are often naive and easily manipulated (though they would hate to think so). A simple example is a scam that hit Facebook users late last fall. Many teens had their accounts phished and the phishers sent out posts from those accounts to their friends that said "OMG! There are some photos of you on this website", along with a link to the website. The website showed hazy photos in the background that were hard to make out and appeared to be somewhat pornographic. A popup told the visitor they would have to register for an account in order to view photos on the site. We're certain that many kids were tricked into revealing a lot of personal information about themselves in this scam. In another scam that targeted MySpace in the last couple of years, more than 14,000 users were tricked by fake MySpace pages into visiting music web sites to purchase music for $2-3 per album. Instead of getting music, the site charged their credit cards $300-600. Kids are easily fooled. They want to believe what is said to them, especially when it appears that others believe. Scammers use this trick against them by creating 1000's of fake pages on social networks that talk about bogus web sites to buy stuff, products that don't work (e.g. herbal meds) and cool pages that only result in drive-by spyware downloads.
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