Farmville and apps related to Farmville (AKA Zynga) seem to top the charts in all the spam in social media today. If any of your friends are gullible enough to activate the app and answer their questions, you will be bombarded with automatic notices of their activity. Your friends will get messages that you need this, or want to trade that, or you just got that, or you just lost your farm, and a multitude of other useless informational posts. If anyone gets caught up in the scam they give the app access to all their friends and they’re asked to answer a series of questions or fill out a survey. At some point in the process Farmville will get around to asking for your mobile telephone number. You will then start to see an extra $10 a month (or more) show up on your phone bill. As soon as you’re hooked you start getting offers from other companies wanting you to answer questions and receive Farmville points as a reward which will also show up as charges on your phone bill.

For a long time it was easy just to block the application but now the scams’ programmers have figured out a way to create automatic “news releases” from the people they have already scammed. As of this writing there don’t appear to be any way to block these other than blocking the friend that’s spamming you. The news release might look something like this. Automatic links have been disabled to protect my readers. DO NOT visit this site.