Tweeting

 

More than 5,000 tweets in the past 5 days. Now, that’s a busy scam! Not a very imaginative one, however, as its variants have almost the same wording:

The arsenal of persuasion also seems to include words such as “insane, unbelievable, too amazing.” While some variants advertise the giveaway without asking for anything in return, others specify that you need to provide your e-mail address to get the free gadget.

The URLs used to help spread the scam are shortened with various shortening services and ultimately lead to the same shady survey site (i.e. blocked by Bitdefender antifraud scanners as spreading spam and scams).….with a little detour. The tweeted links first lead to a couple of sites registered by the creators of this scheme. One example here:

You never land on the respective sites as they only serve to redirect you to the survey site they want you on.

“If you’re wondering why such a mechanism would be set in place, there are two possible explanations. Either the owners of the survey website got their hands dirty in order to boost their rank or individuals who are out to gain affiliate money from the respective site used this method to attract new users. The re-direct mechanism that we’ve spotted in this case increases the ranking of the newly registered sites as well”, said Tudor Florescu, Bitdefender Online Threats Analyst.

Don’t forget that  Bitdefender Safego (beta) now protects Twitter accounts as well. All Safego users are safe from this scam.

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

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