Ok, for all of you that like to laugh, here’s a new scam (or an old one, repackaged). As many of you know, I’m all mac now, at home and at work. I also set up Google Alerts for my work and church (and a few other things too). Well, spammers (or a new breed) are now setting up plain sites that have business names in it, there’s no text, just a really long title, with all of the business names.
What happens is that Google, will crawl through the web, looking for the key words that you set up. Well these spammers sites have these same key words, so when Google crawls the spammers site, Google flags it as an alert and sends the spammers website url/address to your email, saying it’s found a site that’s met your criteria.
Well, when you click on the link, it brings you to the spammers site, which then will do anything from collect stats to redirect you to another site that looks like it’s scanning your harddrive. Below are a few screen shots of what happens when it scans your harddrive (even though it’s not really scanning).
The below pic is what happens after you click on the window. It asks you to install this virus scan (even though it’s a virus) – It’s an exe file, so on a mac (which doesn’t know what to do with an exe file), it doesn’t do anything. Notice my little Mac symbol in the upper left corner.
The sad this is that many fall for this – don’t you be one of them!
Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap
