A new scam has appeared on the fraud spotlight recently, promising a video of the recent tragic event in The Alton Towers. What happened there was that a roller coaster crashed, resulting in many people being injured. Like many other cliché Facebook™ scams, this one redirects you to a copycat Youtube™ website, promising to show you the video after you distribute it to others by sharing it.
What are Online Traffic Driving Scams?
Traffic fraud is usually any online scam, which redirects the user to an individual blog or a website. Thus, the user is generating fake traffic to make it more famous without any actual coverage. What is interesting about this particular fraud is that, besides clicking share on the fake Youtube-like website and redirecting you to a Brazilian website, it is also capable of stealing your personal information. To some extent, such scams can cause you financial losses, by redirecting you to locations that prompt you to input your banking credentials.
How to Protect Yourself?
Users generally know how to indicate a scam, but since it is redistributed in Facebook by trusted individuals in your Friends list, attention should be paid to it. And in case you happen to be redirected to such malicious websites that may cause severe damage to your PC and you wallet, it is highly recommended to seek professional software that detects and blocks such frauds.
Watch out for any posts that indicate recent events and always check the website link that you are being redirected to since this can lead to locations where potential attackers might be waiting to infect your computer. The worst case scenario is contamination with a Ransomware Trojan Horse that encrypts your data and asks for a fee to decrypt it.