@Home Work for High Pay Makes Spam Bot a Smart Boy

“A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound [….] Is all that makes the world go around” (You said it, Liza!). Ok, you don’t care about the world spinning faster (we’re all dizzy as it is)….but you do care about earning more, don’t you? In that case, a work from home offer promising you can easily make 636 $ or even 858 $ is quite an interesting tweet to read. 

Hoping to be able to tell our grandchildren a nice story about that one click that changed your life and put their ma through college, we’ll just dive right into the virtual world of all possibilities. Clickety-click, the magic trick and Sesame opens…

…to reveal a nice web page containing a very convincing story about the wonders of working online.

As it happens, not all of us were born yesterday, so this nice story won’t work its charm unless somebody gives us verifiable proof to back it up. It shouldn’t be that difficult, given that this story appears to have also been reported (and supposedly investigated) by MSNBC, ABC, USA Today, BBC and CNN. Quite an impressive list. To see what their take on it was, we’ll just click one of the logos. Surprise!

Nice busy Online Income advertising page….but no big story….Fishy? Perhaps…How about it if we just tried again?

Back to the first page, let’s see what it takes to get into this scheme. A three step procedure laid out nice and clear:

The basic form they’re asking you to fill in (Step 1) matches your name to an e-mail address and a country. Let’s just say that I’m not too happy about the accuracy of the Step 3 provision: “You should receive your first cheque within a week or so. Or you can start to have them wired directly into your bank account.” (really, now…wouldn’t you like my bank account number as well?). Just saying….don’t call me paranoid!

The Online Income Solutions page (Step 2) is the one we landed on when trying to double-check the story of Kelly, the happy worker from home. Nothing really wrong here …except that they’re asking you to pay 19,95$ for what appears to be a course that will eventually enable you to…..exactly, work online, from home!

 

 

Reassuring though the note may be (namely that you will not be re-billed), the truth is that some scammers prefer to take small amounts from large groups of people, rather than just hit it big one time only. Paranoid again? Perhaps.

You’d expect people to be running around like crazy chasing such an excellent offer. Unless, of course, the offer started chasing them….relentlessly. When trying to navigate away from the first page that the tweeted link led them to, they get not one, but two “you don’t know what you’re missing” messages.

To add some topping to this nice scam cake, a similar looking tweet will link to a page in Russian that apparently sells a multimedia player.

According to Bitdefender Safego statistics, this scam has generated approximately 400 spam tweets in the past 24 hours, with 75 unique URLs thrown in the game (figures valid for September 7, 2011). One interesting element in this case would be that approximately 200 fake accounts acting as spam bots have been created to help propagate this “work from home” message (one example in the image below).

Don’t forget that Bitdefender Safego (beta) is there to keep your Twitter accounts safe from spam, scams and other e-threats.

This article is based on the technical information provided courtesy of Tudor Florescu, BitDefender Online Threats Analyst.

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