Sophos Cloud Optix
TweetMeme, a service which tries to work out which are the most popular links being spread via Twitter, has unfortunately helped spammers overnight promote a make-money-fast “work from home” website.
Thousands of Twitter accounts have been posting messages like the following in the last few hours:
hey everyone you've got to check this out I made $560 today so far [LINK]
or
check out this article! I made $200 today! [LINK]
or
CNBC7 - Work at home mom makes $6,795/month working part-time from home [LINK]
Clicking on the link takes you to a website called CNBC7, which poses as a genuine news website but was actually registered from China less than a week ago.
As we’ve seen in other scams of this type, the site claims to have been featured in the mainstream media (CNN, USA Today, Fox News and others are listed) and that you can earn between $5000 and $7000 a month working from home.
However, the photos are grabbed from stock image galleries, and the site attempts to determine where you are visiting from to give a (fake) case study of someone close to you who is allegedly earning a small fortune working on their home computer while caring for two young children.
Hopefully you wouldn’t be foolish enough to fall for such schemes.
Unfortunately, this particular stream of tweets, has caught the attention of TweetMeme, who have shared it with their almost 60,000 Twitter followers and their many website visitors.
As the CNBC7 site, and others like it, are being actively advertised by social networking spammers the sensible course of action remains to stay well clear.
So what is the point of these scams? Obviously the victim does not, but how does the scammer make it's money or is it just to take over your computer? This article doesn't have enough info to address what the point of all of this is.
Normally the pages require you to pay some money to get your "work from home" kit. In other situations, the "work" they ask you to do from home may actually also be connected with criminal activity – for instance, transferring funds from hacked bank accounts, breaking CAPTCHA codes to allow spammers to post more messages online, spread spam campaigns via social networks etc.
Agree. I would be happy to pass the link on to my list of security interested buddies if the allegations were better researched. Agree one would suspect foul play, and there most certainly is, but I'm not going to pass on unsubstantiated suspicions. I could research it myself, but hey, I'm not the one employed as a security expert …
It is not a bad idea to get a piece of scrap paper and draw a line down the center. When you come across a work from home opportunity that appeals to you, totally investigate it inside and out.
someone please help me i keep getting these straight in my sent back to my contacts can someone please help as it's very annoying and my friends keep saying im sending this crap.
Please help asap
Shaun
Hey, I’ve got the same problem–how can you get rid of this crap-
all my contacts think I am sending it to them! Will have to contact each
of them and try to block it on their end? Let me know if you come up with
a solution!~
Howard
Good day,I really love all what I read and love to be part of it,am cool and easy going man.keep it up.
i just got the same message in email from a fellow hotmail contact
I got it also from a hotmail contact whose account had been viagracised before. All hotmail accounts that I had contact with had been compromised in one way or the other. I wish they’d do something about it or do they make money with that. Even the hotmail email account which a friend cancelled 7 months ago, is still sending me viagra messages! I nowadays recommend to people to stay away from hotmail.
I'm guessing that the $5 that you pay for the work at home kit is paid for by credit card. This could leave your credit in danger if they decide to deduct more than the $5 charge. That kit could cost you $5,000 and how can you prosecute anyone from China?
I just got a text with a friends name from CNBC7NEWS and am wondering how it got to my cell phone from his email. My friend said it was sent to everyone in his address book. It didn't go to my email. How would they get my cell phone number?
Thanks, Anne
I was almost fooled into getting scammed out of $100! Normally I would never fall for such a thing but a tweet was posted "from" someone who anyone would consider to be a very reliable, totally honest fairly well-known person! How they did this is beyond me, they somehow hijacked her twitter name & it seemed like it was posted by her! BEWARE do not fall for this work at home scam!