Crooks rely on extremely appealing incentives

Nov 17, 2014 13:30 GMT  ·  By

Crooks are currently running a new scam on Facebook, spreading fake messages about free vouchers worth a few hundred US dollars being offered by reputable retailers such as Nike, Macy’s and Target.

This is not the typical online survey scam, but the steps that need to be taken by the potential victim are the same, as is the end-game of the crooks: to make the unsuspected user complete the surveys and thus earn money for the scammers.

A simple way to make money for crooks

The site hosting these deceitful promotions is webcoupons[.]pw, and at the moment it runs a campaign that purports to deliver a $200 / €160 gift card from Target, in exchange for sharing, leaving a comment and liking the offer.

Worth noting is that the scammy page announces an expiration date for claiming the voucher, which is currently set for November 27, 2014.

Late last week, OnlineThreatAlerts (OTA) reported that the page promoted fake coupons from Nike and Macy’s, worth $240 / €192 and $200 / €160, respectively. The same trick was used by the scammers.

OTA says that another purpose for creating this type of pages is to increase their popularity so that they can be sold for a larger amount of money. When this happens, all the content it collected (comments, Facebook profiles) is passed to the new owners.

Promotional purposes can be one of the goals, but a page with a higher rank in search engines may also be leveraged for spreading malware or different types of scams.

Comments, especially those thanking for an offer of some sort, from real Facebook users are a real asset for crooks.

Take your “like” back and delete the comment

As it usually happens with most Facebook scams, the offer comes from someone in the list of friends who already fell for the trick and was asked to share the page in order to get to the voucher.

For security reasons, the rule of thumb on the web is never to share content or messages that have not been verified, because there is no guarantee of their legitimacy.

Sharing is the first hurdle in getting the alleged free voucher; dropping a comment is the second one (it is also posted on Facebook by default).

In the third part of the scam, the potential victim has to “like” the offer and “complete the participation requirements,” which consist in filling online surveys.

Users are advised to exercise care when facing suspicious offers such as this one. If they already fell for the trick, they should revert their action by unliking and deleting their comment.

Most of the times, the operators of the scam recycle the elements of the page and use them in other campaigns. For instance, the number of likes in this one was used on another occasion, back in August.

Voucher scam: Target, Nike, Macy's (5 Images)

Scammy page hosting fake offer for Target voucher
There's no way to skip to the final stepUsers are given the possibility to avoid posting under their name
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