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Facebook Time Checker Hoax




A spam application called Facebook Time Checker is luring unknowing users into completing advertisers’ offers in order to find out how much time they have spent on the site. And even though it is likely that Facebook itself tracks the length of your sessions for internal use, there’s currently no way a third-party application has access to the duration of your entire usage.

In other words, the application is a hoax and should be avoided at all cost. Especially because we’ve seen variations of the Facebook Time Checker deployed to steal your personal, mobile email address (xxxxxxxxxx@m.facebook.com), allowing the hacker to spam status updates and upload photos directly to a Page you own. The personal email address can only be stolen when the victim completes an extra step from the fake application’s instructions, which is copy-pasting a piece of Javascript in your browser address bar (the code starts with “javascript:var _0xbdfc=[“). On Wednesday for instance, the Lomography page was affected by this scam and its admin inadvertently spammed over 200,000 fans with a status update similar to this:

Facebook Time Checker Status Update

Facebook Time Checker – Find out how much time you’ve spent on Facebook!
www.fbtimecheck.com

Another status update we’ve seen goes like this:

Ive spent over 34 hours on facebook in my lifetime! Wow that’s a lot of time wasted! Find out how much time you’ve spent on facebook here – http://goo.gl/xxxxx

If you executed the Javascript and fell victim to the mobile email address theft, then go to http://m.facebook.com/upload.php and click “Reset Address” for every page that’s been hijacked, or all of them to be on the safe side. This will create a brand new email address and disable the exposed one.

If you visit the final page of the application’s website, you’ll briefly see a message like “You have spent: 225 hours logged in on FB!” which is instantly covered up by a popup asking you to complete a promotional offer. However, you’ll see a different, randomly generated number of hours for every refresh of the page so don’t even bother clicking any of the links in that popup.

Time Checker Popup

Help out and warn your friends about this fake application by sharing this article on your profile.

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Side notes

Facebook Time Checker Hoax Posted by on January 28, 2011 at 9:40 PM. Use this trackback if you're linking this story.

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