14 DAY TRIAL // The name and reputation of Rihanna have often been leveraged by cybercriminals. Every few months or so, another scam promising outrageous or raunchy videos of the celebrity is making the rounds on social media websites, particularly Facebook.
Experts from security firm Sophos report that scam posts promising an explicit tape that “makes you lose all respect for her” have been flooding Facebook over the past days.
The links that accompany these posts point to a website which displays a fake video window. When the play button is clicked, a “verify you are human” page appears, instructing users to hand over a verification code.
The verification code is actually the victim’s authentication token, which the scammers can use to post messages on the user’s Timeline.
Once the verification code is submitted, victims are asked to complete online surveys to further “verify that they’re human.”
Facebook has started blocking the malicious links that point to the scammy websites, but there are several variants of the scam and it’s likely that some of them still work.
A variant identified by Hoax Slayer promises the same video, but the post is written partly in leetspeak: “Rihanna S3x Tape w1th his boyfriend - I l0st all respect f0r her.”
As always, no one ever gets to see the promised videos because in most cases they don’t even exist. Instead, the scammers make some money each time someone visits their website.
We’ve seen a variation of this scam back in November 2011. At the time, there was no mention of the raunchy tape, but the scammers promised a video that would make users lose all respect for Rihanna.
A few months later, in May 2012, another version came to light. At the time, the posts read: ““OMG I Just Hate RIHANNA After Watching This Video [LINK] you will lost your all respect for RIHANNA after watching this.”
The bottom line is that users must be extra careful when clicking on links that promise all sorts of outrageous videos, no matter if they’re featuring Rihanna, Miley Cyrus or other celebrities.
If you already fell for it, be sure to clean up your Facebook timeline. Remove all the posts published on your behalf before your friends click on the links.
