The spammers have employed a simple technique to avoid raising suspicions

Oct 10, 2012 18:31 GMT  ·  By

If you’re ever contacted by a company called One Direction Giveaway (1D Giveaway) on Twitter, you should refrain from clicking on any of their links since they’re part of the latest survey scam campaign.

The spammers send out tweets such as “You Won! Grab a prize”, “Congratulations Fan! You Won”, or “Lucky You! You won a prize.” All the tweets contain the Twitter handles of targeted users, but they don’t contain any links.

Instead, the crooks are relying on the fact that those curios enough to see what they’ve won will visit their profile and click on the URL that’s listed in its description.

Internauts who fall for it and click on the link – onedgiveaway.com – are taken to a website where they’re told that they’ve won a free gift card worth over $500 (385 EUR), experts from GFI Labs report.

However, in order to actually win the prize, users must complete a number of surveys, which earn the fraudsters a certain amount of money for each individual they can trick into completing them.

We advise users to be cautious when offered such “prizes.” No one ever wins anything, except for those who initiate the spam campaign.