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As many games and applications become more popular on social networking websites such as Facebook, people will try to take advantage of people's curiosity (and sometimes, greed) to coax users into joining or adding applications that promises to give you rewards in return.  This is not true and will most like result in sort of phishing for user information.

Some of the games targeted have been Zynga's more popular Mafia Wars, CafeWorld and FarmVille.  Here are some of tags to look for and avoid (use the Facebook feature to 'Hide' unwanted application postings)

"Farmville v"
http://www.facebook.com/pages/FV-Filter/
"via Farmville"
http://www.facebook.com/pages/FreeFarmGiftscom/

"Mafia Wars Bonus Checker"
http://apps.facebook.com/mwgames/


There appears to be a growing number of users being duped into thinking that the application they're joining or signing into is tied into games/applications that he/she uses on the popular social networking site, Facebook.

One example is based on the popular Facebook application, Farmville (by Zynga).


The premise of the game, given a plot of land, you grow crops, grow fruit-bearing trees and raise farm animals and their off-springs.  Like many of the applications on Facebook, players are welcome to send out gifts to other friends to elicit help or to get them join and add the application.

It's this feature that the scammers and info gathers are gambling on to get unsuspecting players to click, join and, in the end, have him/her post links on his/her news feed to try and get their friends in participating.

In the image above, you can see the icon that this fake application is using is the same as the actual application, not to mention the wording.  There are some slight differences like instead of "Farmville", there's "Farmville v".  If you move your mouse over the "Find a collectible" link, you will see that it's pointing to

http://www.facebook.com/pages/FV-Filter/116000185105701?ref=nf

and not to the real application.

Here's another variation based on the game Farmville:

Again, the fake application is using the same icon as the real Farmville but posting time with the application name is slightly different, "via via Farmville" instead of just "via Farmville".  The link "Adopt the Percheron Foal" actually points to:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/FreeFarmGiftscom/332104581865?ref=nf