The rapid growth of Pinterest has made the social pinboarding site a new target for spammers and cyber criminals.
Paul Pajares, fraud analyst from Trend Micro, says, in March, he first noticed scammers using well-known brands to trick users into pinning fake posts that linked to survey scams. In addition to this, Pajares says he has also now seen posts using URL shorteners such as bit.ly and goo.gl to redirect users to Pinterest-like pages that offer prizes, vouchers and gift cards.
“Made to resemble a typical Pinterest Web page, the fake site features a search field, add+, and about. However, these are mere images and are not clickable. The clickable links are those that redirect to survey scams such as Body Age Quiz,” says Pajares.
Such scams ask users to fill out required fields - including their cellphone numbers. “Users who do provide their numbers will receive a code on their mobile phones and will continue to receive unwanted messages, charges and other scams via text message.”
The scams run via e-mail too, once the user has filled in their contact details. Users then receive e-mails claiming to be from Pinterest.
“The e-mail urges the user to click on the link found in the message body to confirm the subscription. Clicking on the link redirects the user to a Pinterest-like scam page. Again, all the clickable links lead to the same scam pages,” says Pajares.
Social spam
According to Pajares, before users are redirected to the fake Pinterest sites, the connection also passes through ad-tracking sites. “This way, the number of visitors are tracked, determining the supposed earnings of the scammers. Based on our data, the fake Pinterest URLs are being visited since 2 May.”
While Pinterest has removed some of the malicious posts, others are still being spread within the network via re-pins. Pinterest has so far declined to comment on the issue, saying only that its engineers are actively working to manage issues that arise and are revisiting the nature of public feeds on Pinterest to make it more difficult to spread harmful content.
According to reports, spammers account for as many as 40% of all social media accounts. The percentage of posts on social networks deemed to be spam has also doubled in the last six months.
Share