Post by High Priestess on Aug 16, 2018 2:27:40 GMT
Hacker/phishing scams—. Pertaining to vacation rental sites and more
Twice in the last month I have ended up going to what I thought was a legitimate website only to find I was on a phsishing or other criminal scam site. First, I wanted to go to a short term rental platform that I am registered on -- an alternate to Airbnb type site. I went to it but when I entered the URL of the website, I was one letter off and so I went to the phishing site instead. I immediately recognized it as a phishing site because they immediately asking me to enter my private and credit card details in order to logon which is not how this site works . I reported to the real site the existence of this fake site.
Today I searched online for the Walmart site because I was curious if Walmart carries certain product that I was looking for.
I did a Google search for Walmart and the first entry that came up for Walmart I clicked on without thinking much about it.
It was a fake site and immediately a ton of programs started to download onto my computer without my permission and there was a pop up and a robotic voice that announced that my computer has been infected by a virus, and prompting me to call the phone number indicated . (If you do that, you’ll be talking to a criminal who will convince you to pay for software to be downloaded to your computer that will really f-info mess up your computer !!)
Instead I immediately unplugged my computer and disconnected the Internet to stop the download of these tons of files. I then turn off my computer and when I turned it back on I found out about 560 files have been downloaded to my computer so I had to go through and delete all of them they were in the downloads folder of my computer and half of them were TMP files.
I have no idea how a criminal scammer with who created a phishing site that is a fake Walmart site was able to get their site listed on page 1 number one of Google search results for Walmart (I believe in retrospect, their site was listed as an "ad", but it was literally page one number one of all Walmart search results!!) but it just goes to show that you have to be ever so careful these days because the scammers are creating a lot of fake sites.
Twice in the last month I have ended up going to what I thought was a legitimate website only to find I was on a phsishing or other criminal scam site. First, I wanted to go to a short term rental platform that I am registered on -- an alternate to Airbnb type site. I went to it but when I entered the URL of the website, I was one letter off and so I went to the phishing site instead. I immediately recognized it as a phishing site because they immediately asking me to enter my private and credit card details in order to logon which is not how this site works . I reported to the real site the existence of this fake site.
Today I searched online for the Walmart site because I was curious if Walmart carries certain product that I was looking for.
I did a Google search for Walmart and the first entry that came up for Walmart I clicked on without thinking much about it.
It was a fake site and immediately a ton of programs started to download onto my computer without my permission and there was a pop up and a robotic voice that announced that my computer has been infected by a virus, and prompting me to call the phone number indicated . (If you do that, you’ll be talking to a criminal who will convince you to pay for software to be downloaded to your computer that will really f-info mess up your computer !!)
Instead I immediately unplugged my computer and disconnected the Internet to stop the download of these tons of files. I then turn off my computer and when I turned it back on I found out about 560 files have been downloaded to my computer so I had to go through and delete all of them they were in the downloads folder of my computer and half of them were TMP files.
I have no idea how a criminal scammer with who created a phishing site that is a fake Walmart site was able to get their site listed on page 1 number one of Google search results for Walmart (I believe in retrospect, their site was listed as an "ad", but it was literally page one number one of all Walmart search results!!) but it just goes to show that you have to be ever so careful these days because the scammers are creating a lot of fake sites.