Pornography Used As Bait In Social Networking Fraud

In the past month, Symantec has observed a fraudulent website spoofing a social networking brand. The phishing website has tried to make an association between a pornographic website and the social networking brand. The legitimate social networking site does not involve itself with any form of pornography or adult sex chat. The pornographic website provides free pornography and offers additional features for paid accounts.
The phisher’s motive of associating the two otherwise disparate sites is to trick users into believing that they can view pornography—with all the added features for free—within the social networking website. The phishing website also displayed some adult user profiles as the most popular profiles of the week or month to tempt users to chat with them. These profiles, however, are fake and do not exist on the legitimate social networking site. If fraudsters are successful, the user would have given up his or her login credentials to the phishing website in the hopes of viewing pornography or participating in adult chat.

The use of pornography as bait is not new and similar cases have been observed in phishing sites spoofing information services brands. To read more on those trends, please refer to the blog entitled "Phishing Using Pornographic Content as Bait." The phishing website was hosted on a Web-hosting site. Upon entering login information, the Web page redirects (continue reading...)