Scam-Alert: Characterizing Work from Home Scams on Social Networks

Online social networks have become a favorite platform for marketers and advertisers. Due to the wide reach of these networks and low cost of advertisement, there has been an upsurge of marketing and advertising campaigns on social media. Social networks like facebook, twitter and google+ possess the capability to quickly turn any piece of information viral, thus increasing its impact. However, there do not exist many tools which can tell whether an information circulating on social media is genuine or fraudulent. We confine ourselves to a specific section of marketing campaigns in this work, which is – “Work from home ” campaigns. “Work from home ” schemes are run with the intention of providing users an attractive option of working from home in return of some remuneration. Unfortunately, many of such “work-from-home ” ads floating on social network are actually scams which mislead and cheat on the end user in more than one way. In this work, we present a study of online money making campaigns run on a popular social network – Google+, and propose an approach to distinguish genuine campaigns from scams