Facebook users who've clicked viral links such as 'Click This if You Hate Cancer' could be in for a nasty surprise. 

The links - and others such as 'click this picture and see what happens' do nothing except make cyber-scammers rich. 

Once the pages have collected huge numbers of 'Likes', they are then sold, for cash, to other businesses who use them to make their page appear popular. 

A blog post by Daylan Pearce, a search-engine expert at Next Digital in Melbourne, explains how the nonsense posts scam works - and shows how the pages are sold on.

The posts - images with captions such as 'Like if you can see the tiger,' or 'Comment and see what happens' are used to build 'Likes' and 'Comments' for pages.