In the recent days, many of us in
India would have come across post saying “Friends I Got 200 Rs Free Recharge Only in 5- 10 Minutes…
100 comments only” or comments under several Facebook post’s with a link to malicious website. These comments are posted by people who were
duped to do so in order to get the free recharge amount. However they end up
spamming others with comments, share their personal information and install spyware on their
smartphone. This is a new variant of the old ‘Free Mobile Recharge’ scam circulating
on Facebook and other popular social networking sites.
Clicking on the link in the Spam comments
will redirect users to a site as seen below. It would suggest users to complete
3 steps to get the free recharge amount of Rs 100 or 200. In the first step, it
collects user mobile number, operator and city information. The website
contains lot of spelling mistakes; if the user was alert he/she would’ve avoided
giving away their information.
As part of the second step, it
suggests user to copy and paste the spam content/message on 20 different post comments.
It also contains a note saying “Don’t try to cheat. Our java facebook comment
detector will detect your comments. 20 comments = 200 talk time and 30 comments
= 300 talk We can detect maximum 100 comments only.” Indirectly suggests that users
to paste the malicious content for 100 times. In that way users are going to
spam others and attract more users into this scam campaign. As part of the final
step, it informs user that this is the most important part of the process and
requests them to install two apps. Even though mobile platforms block apps installations
from untrusted sources many people don’t realize the importance and install the
unverified apps by disabling the default security features. In case the device
is rooted or jail broken it won’t flash any alert notification to users.
It not only has installation file
for android phones, it also have installers for Windows, iPhone, Symbian and
Java OS based smartphones. Below you could see the apk files installed on an
android tablet phone.
