It’s been a while since we saw a “Who is viewing your profile” scam spreading on Tumblr complete with spammy application and surveys galore – February, to be exact – but here’s the latest one bouncing around the popular social network right now.
You’ll notice it apes the template of the site in the linked blog – same spam posts, same spam application name – although the website for this one looks fairly slick.
It’s possible this one is closely related to the February spamrun, as the same Bit.ly user account created shortening URLs for both.
Here’s the spam popping up on various blogs:
Below is the site it leads to, located at
reviewsloft(dot)com/a/?3
This is the app offered up to logged-in Tumblr users should they click the green button, and this is what posts the spam to blogs:
Once the install is done, they’ll show the inevitable surveys to the end-user to make some money. As before, a bit.ly link is used so we can check out some of the stats and compare / contrast.
At time of writing the February blog, the total clicks were in the region of 2,900. Revisiting the stats page, we can see that it rolled on and on to hit the heady heights of some 39,000+ clicks which is quite a bump-up.
With this current spamrun, we can see that we’re hitting about 19,000 in 12 days, with around 2,000 clicks listed as coming from Tumblr and the rest classed as “unknown”.
Not a huge amount of information to go on, then, but a good reminder that people continue to fall for this type of scam which has been around for the longest time.
As a final note, the rogue application will continue to post to your Tumblr until you go into your user settings and remove the app. To do this, read the step-by-step walkthrough on the blog linked at the top of the article, or follow the instructions listed on the Tumblr account security page.
At that point, the spam posts can stop and you can go back to emergency kittens and debating whether Doctor Who fans calling themselves Dweeks instead of Whovians is a terrible idea or merely not great.
Christopher Boyd
