Enter the first letter of your father's name

Already been fooled today?

A seemingly harmless game on Facebook turns out to be a bold scam to lure people into an affiliate competition. This clearly shows how creative people on Facebook are when it comes to luring Facebook users into commission programs. But let's start from the beginning. and let's take a look at the supposedly harmless game.

The Facebook page “worldwide” asks its users to type the first letter of their own father’s name and then reload the post. A little luridly, it is added that you should try not to scream.

Of course, what has to happen happens here too, namely nothing is enough. No matter what you type or not, the status message will not change. Of course, this also applies to all other small, seemingly harmless games that claim that you should type something and then the picture will change.

What you can observe, however, is that thousands of people follow the request to type in the first letter of their own father's name.

 

Stop! Something is happening!

Wait, we have to revise our statement a little bit. Something does happen: every user who types something receives a message from the site operator. By the way, this private message from the site operator is the only purpose of this silly game, because the site operator sends another request in the message.

Since this is an automatic message, all participants should have received this text.

The link you receive is a so-called affiliate competition. These competitions are part of a commission program in which whoever leads a participant into this competition receives a commission. This is not new and here we find great parallels to classic fake competitions.

We recall and compare: 3 steps

At this point, let's take another look at the classic three steps of a fake competition, which we can also understand in this seemingly harmless game.

The first step is the bait. This bait usually appears in the form of a status message on Facebook, a WhatsApp message or, in rare cases, an Instagram message. These baits are all identical in nature: they convey the prospect of a win that you essentially already have in your pocket. With the ease of participation, they entice you to take part and lure you to a website. This is the bait . The bait is the viral entry into the competition process. In our case, the bait is the seemingly harmless request to type the first letter of your father's name.

Step two is the bridge, which masquerades as a supposed competition with a question and answer session. This round of questions is not necessarily always present because, on the one hand, it is irrelevant and is only intended to simulate the character of a competition. We call this step two the bridge . The bridge takes the form of a fake competition. In this bridge, you are usually promised a prize directly, deception is used and fake elements are used. This bridge is ultimately also an illegal component because the promises made are not kept. Goal of the bridge:

a) Generate virality (example: forward this competition to 20 contacts).
b) A link is installed that should lead to the supposed prize.

In this current case, the site operator's automated private message is the bridge.

The third and final step is a so-called affiliate program. You leave the bridge via a link that contains an affiliate code that belongs to a commission program. This is an affiliate whose content, if possible, correlates with the fake competition taking place in the bridge. We call this final link the exit. Note: The exit itself, i.e. the affiliates that are linked to, is not illegal! These are business models in which the respective provider of such programs compensates its sales partners through commissions. These sales partners are recognized by the provider through an identification code, so that every newly registered participant in the affiliate competition can also be assigned to the sales partner. By the way, the person who designs the bridge freely decides which partner program he uses as an exit. We also often find systems that read the participant's origin and device information and thus direct them specifically to different commission programs. Therefore, you can never say clearly which commission program will ultimately be used; in the worst case, you will end up with dubious WAP billing stories or opaque subscription services.

The fake counts!

Therefore, the author of Bait and Bridge, who is also likely to be the respective sales partner of the affiliate provider, has a great interest in ensuring that his fake story sounds as credible as possible in advance, but at the same time also has a high potential for virality.

In the case of fake news and fake competitions, a good lie is already half the battle. The author of this status report has of course succeeded very well at this point.