Business Tools Blog

Warn your kids immediately … never, ever enter your cell phone number online.

Here’s how the scam works. Your kids join FarmVille via Facebook. Farmville is a game where you create a virtual farm and spend hours of unproductive time growing crops, raising livestock and tilling the earth. By working hard on your “farm”, you earn virtual money. If you lack patience you can invest real cash (through PayPal or a credit card) to buy virtual goods, such as seed or a tractor.

If you think spending cash on a virtual tractor is silly, you can still get virtual cash by accepting an offer from one of the advertisers.  These offers will give you virtual money in return for signing up for their product.

The scam artists go one step further. They lure players in with an offer to take a bogus survey or IQ test. Once it’s completed they require a cell-phone number to send the results. When you enter your cell number and create a password, you have subscribed to a service that you will be billed for. Here’s the kicker, phone companies will not cancel services from a third-party provider — even if you cannot find out who that provider is.

With 63 million people playing FarmVille, there is a lot of risk! It will probably take a class action lawsuit to permanently put these scams to bed.