Sophos Cloud Optix
The Draw Something game is a soaraway success, with hundreds of millions of downloads onto iPhone and Android smartphones since it was launched early last month.
Everyone’s talking about it, and the hype became even huger when OMGPop, the New York software house that created the app, was sold for a cool $210 million to gaming goliath Zynga.
But with so much buzz and interest in the Pictionary-style game, it’s perhaps not a surprise to find scammers trying to make a quick buck by leaping on the bandwagon.
Here’s a Twitter account we found, that’s spamming users telling them that they have won a prize.
From what we have seen, the account appears to be targeting Twitter users who have mentioned “Draw Something” in past tweets.
The Twitter account, which is not affiliated with OMGPop, claims it is giving away 5000 prizes to “lucky” Draw Something fans, and that players can claim their award by visiting a newly-created website called drawsomethingwinner.com.
If you visit the site you are asked a few simple questions, before being told that you are eligible to receive an award.
What you will discover, however, is that you are taken to an all-too-familiar survey scam. Your chances of ever receiving a prize are remote – chances are that you will either end up handing over personal information, or will be helping the original scammer earn commission.
We’ve reported the account as spam to Twitter, and hopefully they’ll shut it down soon. But it wouldn’t be a surprise to see more Draw Something-related scams both on Twitter and perhaps on Facebook also given its tremendous popularity.
Update:
Well, what do you know.. as soon I tweeted about this, I instantly got a response from a different Twitter scam account:
So I’ve reported that account as a spammer too. 🙂
Bought by Zynga? There goes the neighborhood.
I can't quite tell if that tweet to you was satire on the scammers part, or just pure idiocy.
Unfortunately I suspect the latter.
I think it was automatically generated.
I got one of those tweets earlier, Just ignored it. You'd have to be thick to fall for stuff like that.
I have seen that scam as a how many videos do you watch a week its a joke how many times they try to rename it I spot it as a scam!
You'd think that after all this time and all these scams, people would learn to recognize them. But the fact that they continue seems to indicate that the scammers are still succeeding in finding abundant suckers. It would be depressing if it weren't for the likelihood that this is some form of natural selection performed by the human species on itself.