According to a report by Eset Latin America, a type of scam was detected that is circulating on WhatsApp, in which criminals seek to capture people’s attention offering them raffles for products returned to Mercado Libre.
These types of messages would be reaching potential victims from known contacts who have also fallen into the trapin addition to the statement that informs regarding raffles of 10,000 returned items, a compressed link is sent that promises to direct users to the official website of Mercadolibre, which is the company that the cybercriminals are impersonating.
This fraudulent campaign would be another phishing casebecause cyber thieves try to make the landing sites or landing pages look as real as possible, including elements such as the logo, colors and characteristic fonts of, in this case, Mercado Libre.
In addition to copying the visual identity of the official web pages of the e-commerce site, the criminals also seek to build trust by including false testimonials from alleged winners of this draw and a questionnaire for users to give their opinion of the company’s service.
Being inside the fraudulent site and following answering some questions, the user is redirected to a very different type of raffle than the one promised at the beginning, as it turns out that this is much better, since the contestant has 3 opportunities to discover a prize, but Regardless of the option you choose, you will always win. quite expensive prizes such as cell phones or cash.
As a requirement to receive the prize, the alleged winner must share the link and the offer to a minimum number of their WhatsApp contacts, causing the trap to spread massively without the cybercriminal having to intervene, it is for this reason that the deception is almost always sent by an acquaintance.
But like all bogus internet rewards, following sharing the link, the victim is redirected to another website containing scarewarea type of invasive ads warning that the cell phone has a system failure and that therefore an application must be downloaded urgently.
For this moment, on none of the sites to which the user has been redirected, the draw is referred to once more, and now the attackers try to keep the attention of the potential victim through questionnaires, buttons or comments. Nevertheless, At this point people should already begin to suspect that it is just a scam attempt.
The cybersecurity company, Eset, informs that the button to download the possible updates is no longer available on these malicious sites, however, these web pages still contain all kinds of false information such as advertisements for more gifts, bonuses and other types of invasive tabs.
– The most important suggestion of all is to distrust and for no reason open links that offer any type of gifts or bonuses from well-known companies, since they are only excuses to attract the attention of users.
– Although the website visually appears to be from a legitimate company, verify that the link address is related to the company, this time the domain had no relation to the official URL of Mercado Libre.
– Ignore any advertisement that is displayed from a website that warns regarding computer viruses or failures in the device’s system, since these types of notifications are always internal and are displayed by the same cell phone or some antivirus that is installed .
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