The old "new" Japanese scams

16/03/2011 Written by Boris Mutina (minor.float)

Dear friends, in these days we all turned our minds to Japan, to the Japan­ese peo­ple, some of them are our friends, or some of our friends live in Japan.
We would like to express the con­do­lences to the fam­i­lies which lost their fam­ily mem­bers. We are deeply con­cerned about the injuries and losses caused by the earth­quake set, tsunami flood­ing and the nuclear cat­a­stro­phe.

Nev­er­the­less, we have to express also our anger. We already recorded first set of the scam emails ask­ing the unaware users to donate for the char­ity, but as usual the money will never come to the vic­tims. The scam sce­nario is very sim­i­lar to other scams using donat­ing over Pay­Pal, WU, Mon­ey­gram etc…

Another form of the scam is the Face­book clickjacking/​likejacking scam with the sick title “Japans Tsunami Sends whale Smash­ing Into A Build­ing” or sim­i­lar. While the peo­ple are hot for the news from Japan, this and sim­i­lar scams serve to the viral spread­ing of the link, some of them also deliver an unso­licited ads. Already many secu­rity com­pa­nies informed about this issue (for exam­ple Sophos reported it here).
Such scam web­sites are also try­ing to trick the users into enter­ing their data into the fake surveys…

Lastly BBC had to denounce a fake news that pan­icked the peo­ple across the Asia. The news was spread via the SMS but also on the social net­works claim­ing that the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment issued the warn­ing about a pos­si­bil­ity of the radioac­tive rain in Phillip­ines and Hong Kong. This wannabe joke can act con­tra pro­duc­tively — if a real warn­ing will be issued, and this can hap­pen every minute, it is pos­si­ble that some of the affected peo­ple will not react because of the pre­vi­ous fake news.

The social engi­neer­ing tech­niques used in the above men­tioned cases are noth­ing new, but this is not the right time to play with the human mind.

If you have any com­ments, send them to comments@​zone-​h.​org.

Comments:

Dis­claimer: Zone-​H or any of the staff mem­bers is not respon­si­ble for the com­ment con­tent. We are not sup­port­ing attacks to any web­site, as you can read here.

Our reader Reelix sent us a suggestion:

Hello!
Just an idea!
Get peo­ple to sub­mit fake “Help Japan” pages that are cur­rently in use
scam­ming inno­cent peo­ple, then the com­mu­nity can decide what needs to
be done about them :)
Just a thought.

– Reelix