14 DAY TRIAL // Internet users are well aware of the fact that there are many scams which advertise methods and products that supposedly can help an individual earn easy money. Now, cybercriminals are starting to focus their attention on schemes that rely on apps.
Experts from Bitdefender have come across a piece of software called “How to Earn Money” which can allegedly help users make a quick buck without too much hassle.
In reality, the shady application hides a malware, identified by Bitdefender as Trojan.Fraud.A. Once installed, the program places itself in the Program Files folder, it creates shortcuts, and starts pushing HTML pages that advertise a tool which can help you earn tens of thousands of dollars in just over a month.
“Ex-retail slave discovers a simple system that generates up to $24,836.87 per month and only takes 30 minutes to get starter. Watch this and see how simple it really is,” reads one of the ads.
To gain possession of the miracle tool, the user must pay an apparently small fee of $37 (28 EUR) or $47 (35 EUR).
Of course, as in most cases, the victim never makes any money, but the cybercrooks who run the campaign certainly do.
Furthermore, to make the websites they push harder to blacklist and verify, the HTML pages that pop up on the screen after the application is installed don’t reveal the domain on which they're hosted.
Those looking for an online job can check out this article we wrote some time ago about identifying fake offers.
As we said at the time, there are a lot of ways to make money on the web, but none of them implies the simple press of a button, and these jobs are never advertised via aggressive marketing means.