WoW..!! Friends I Got 200 Rs Free Recharge Only in 5- 10 Minutes…

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.

Once the applications were installed they have the permission to track your location, read phone logs, change WIFI and network state, send and delete SMS, and kill other applications.  It also contacts several ad serving and tracking servers in the background for marketing and money generating purposes. From the behavior It is clear that the motive of this scam is to collect user personal information and to track and serve advertisement so that the spammers can earn money. If you’ve been victim of this scam I suggest you to uninstall all the unauthorized and untrusted apps from your smartphone and facebook account.