Supposed retailer Whatsapp scam doing the rounds – 08/06/2019

 

In May 2019 a scam was doing the rounds on WhatsApp that was supposedly promoting Pick n Pay’s 50^thbirthday with the offer of vouchers worth R250.00. Clicking on the website link provided in the WahtsApp message took you to a webpage that pretended to be Pick n Pay’s and it looked like a genuine site as only the first part of the site was displayed on the first line in the message to make it look legitimate.

 

 

The fraudulent site was http://www.picknpay.com-freevouchers.com/ which also wasn’t secure as it didn’t have the s for a secure site in the http address of the genuine site which is https://www.picknpay.co.za. At the time of clicking on the link a list of references appeared giving people’s names and comments about the free voucher offer to promote it. None of the links were clickable or allowed you to reply to the comments or connect to links, indicating that they were fake.

 

 

You then needed to answer a couple of questions, after which you were informed that you needed to forward the message to 20 friends in order to redeem our voucher. There were no contactable references or information on the supposed promotion and a further give-away factor was the low-resolution company logo on the fake website.

 

Running the promotion in a Sandbox to determine what processes were running in the background and try and identify who was behind the fake promotion indicated that the contact details of each user were being transmitted offshore to a domain where they were no doubt being saved for future targeting.

 

One has to be very wary of these sorts of activities on social media as it is a growing problem in order for cyber criminals to capture valuable contact information for use at a later stage. Once you have obliged to a request such as this particular case whereby you are asked to forward the promotion to your friends, you are also putting them at risk and the criminals have further personal information on you and your specific friendships to use to their advantage in some way or another.