Scammers Lure Users with Google+ Invitations

Google+ has generated a lot of buzz online during the past week prompting scammers to take advantage of people's interest into the platform.

Google's new social networking project was launched in private beta mode last week, meaning that users can only join if they are invited by people who are already members.

Inviting someone to the network only requires sharing a post or some other content and specifying their email address.

A notification will be sent to that address automatically with a link that allows the recipient to sign up for the new service.

However, Google has been enabling and disabling the invitation system at random intervals, probably due to testing, which caused conflicting reports about whether users can join or not.

Scammers are trying to take advantage of the confusion and are offering free Google+ invites. Security researchers from GFI have spotted rogue YouTube video posts that claim to provide instant invitations.

However, opening the URLs provided in the description of the rogue videos takes users to pages that ask them to fill in surveys before proceeding. These are part of affiliate marketing schemes that pay scammers money for every user that completes them.

In reality they are not even surveys. Most of them are special offers that require registration in exchange for free product samples or trials. These can have hidden costs and the personal information disclosed is used to spam users with more promotions in the future.

But the surveys are not the only threat. According to Christopher Boyd, a senior researcher at GFI, after completing any of the offers users are offered to download a file called Googleplus2.rar.

Unfortunately, the archive was no longer available for analysis by the time the researcher got to it, but it's very likely that it contained malware.