People surf through the net during Dewali, Thanksgiving and Christmas festive season shopping with a view to send gifts to their loved ones. And shockingly, a few criminals have sent down spammed messages on the net offering some attractive incentives on various pretexts.
This time round the spammers have taken the route via @twitter, the world’s most popular social-media website awarding gift vouchers for attractive schemes. They are sending down tweets containing holiday theme attacks with shortened URLs repeatedly to lure innocent tweeples.
These URLs accompanying the tweets, when opened, will lead you to web-sites, which, supposedly will send you gift vouchers which one can pass on as gifts or use it themselves.
And each such URL will lead you to a site wherein you are asked to complete a ‘Survey’ by which once completed will enable you to earn points depending upon the difficulty experienced during the survey be it because of the language problem or for whatever reason.
Here are a few samples of the tweets sent down by one such spammer on @twitter and coincidently these three instances, though differently suggestive and with different shortened URLs, open up to the same web site. Just note the disguise also.
– Find a Grant from the US Government – http://bit.ly/9TSKMa [1]
-Stop your cravings – http://bit.ly/afINw0 [2]
-Free iPad – http://bit.ly/bI486l [3]
The catch is that none of the sites mentioned therein are legitimate. In all such surveys the users are revealing their IP address and they invariably ask their date of birth, email id and password. Obviously the behavior of such web-sites is suspicious. Twitter has since classified the web-site as a spam site in order to protect users.
Never reveal your password and your date of birth unless it is essential and/or absolutely secured.
The Christmas season is fast approaching and the criminals are taking advantage of this occasion in trying to lure tweeples into spamming their products. And rest assured, tweeples will never be able to lay their hands o the watches, handbags or jewelery for the discounted prices shown therein.
So, beware of the non-existent gift vouchers.
Ravi Matah.