We are alerted by someone who submits to hpHosts, a free-to-use Malwarebytes facility where users can look up potentially malicious URLs, about a few scam domains being shared on Steam via its chat feature. They’re essentially similar to what we have seen before: they purport to be legitimate gift card pages but ask users to share, like, Tweet, or +1 first before they can get their free stuff. Doing any of these may seen harmless, but it really isn’t. The more users are agreeing to do the scammers’ bidding without knowing they’re being scammed, the more they’re helping them build up their social profiles and SEO ranking for credibility. And the more credible something looks or the higher these domains appear on Web searches, the more people will think they’re the real deals.
I realized that one of the sites reported to us was already mentioned on the blog post, “Like Getting Free Steam Stuff? This Post is for You” in 2015.
If you haven’t read that post yet, we suggest you click that link as we had listed down a number of Steam scam pages you may want to familiarize yourself with. It’s an 8-month old post, but searching on Twitter still yield quite an amount of results. Here’s a small portion of them:
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Moving on, here is another domain that we can add to the “List of Scam Sites to Be Familiar with”: steam-community[DOT]com
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Clicking “Reserve your code” leads to a page that has generated a unique code per user:
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This unique URL, of course, should be shared to a fixed number of contacts, assuming it generates the same amount of visits/referrals.
Unlike previous campaigns wherein users normally end up with a set of surveys they can fill in, this particular scam is designed with no final destination in mind. Every time someone visits the unique URL, they are presented with a page that contains a new unique URL (with its own referral counter), asking the visitor to share it, too. Meanwhile, the referral count of the original sharer remains zero out of 15 even when, say, all 100 of his/her friends visit the URL. It’s a rat race, an endless cycle of sharing links with no real yield other than an increased page visit count to the Web site owner.
Make sure you steer clear of this one and similar sites like it.
Other related post(s):
Jovi Umawing
