That heart breaking photograph of a sick baby on your facebook wall could be a scam. A group of five fraud detecting websites posted their second open letter to facebook on Tuesday, asking the social network to better regulate "sick baby" scams on facebook.
I've been telling you this, but everybody just considered me a hard ass. Well, make your own decision on this subject.
Sick baby photographs are taken from medical journals or old news stories and can be shared on facebook up to 600,000 times, according to the report. Often the photos are accompanied with the message that facebook will donate money for every share, but this is false. The fake donation encourages users to unknowingly perpetuate these malicious scams. The scams make people vulnerable to becoming the target of theft.
Unfortunately, the number of these "sick baby" scams is on the rise. According to stats from one of the anti-scamming sites involved in the open letter, there are 325 baby scams on facebook as of Wednesday. For every fake sick baby photo removed, 22 are uploaded in its place.
Here is my advice:
Don't let these emotionally rending photographs tug at your heart strings!
Go to a reputable support site, check out their history, chose one that suits you and help children that you are sure really exist and not just a photo of some poor child taken from past medical journals!
Click pic to help children in USA
Here are six more reputable sites that do help children in need:
Origional story/links by Kate Freeman on Mashable.com
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