Security researchers have discovered a huge investment scam effort that uses online and telephone channels to target victims across Europe. Since fake investment scams have been around for a while, people are familiar with them.
Over 10,000 malicious websites tailored for consumers in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and the Czech Republic are included in the "gigantic network infrastructure" spotted by Group-IB.
The scammers work hard to promote the campaigns on numerous social media sites, or even compromise Facebook and YouTube to get in front of as many users as they can.
The firm's aim is to mislead consumers into believing they have the chance to invest in high-yield chances and persuade them to deposit a minimum of 250 EUR ($255) to join up for the phony services.
Scam operation
- Posts promoting phony investment schemes on hacked social media accounts, such as Facebook and YouTube, are the first to entice victims.
- Images of regional or international celebrities are frequently used to give the illusion that the scam is real.
- The scammers then demand contact information. In a sophisticated social engineering scam, a 'customer agent' from a call center contacts the victim and offers the investment terms and conditions.
- Eventually, the victim is persuaded to make a deposit of at least 250 EUR, and the information they provided on the false website is either saved and utilized in other attacks or sold on the dark web.
- After the victim deposits the money, they are given access to a fictitious investment dashboard that claims to allow them to monitor daily earnings.
- When the victim tries to use the site to withdraw funds but is first asked for final payment, the fraud is discovered.
Over 5000 of the 11,197 domains used in the campaign were still operational as of this writing.
It is advisable to check that an investment platform is from a reputable broker when it interests you. It may also be possible to spot the fraud by searching for user evaluations and looking for patterns in a large number of comments.
