Researchers have discovered a voting scam that is trying to scare victims into giving up their credit card information. “Vote411.org” is a one-stop shop for election related information. John Oliver of The Daily Show was talking about the website which caused the site to gain more traffic. Just two days after John had promoted the site, a fake page of Vote411 was created, one week before the midterm elections. The scam relies on users not paying attention to the top-level domain (TLD). When victims visit “Vote411.com”, they will be redirected with an alert informing that the user has been infected with the Pegasus spyware and provides a phone number for help. Further investigation had revealed that there are multiple redirects for iOS-based users. When the page was loaded on an Android-based device, researchers received a localized version of the scam which entices the user to enter to win a $6.5 million jackpot.
Analyst Notes
Always be cautious when visiting an unfamiliar webpage. It is very important to ensure that the website a user visits is spelled correctly, or the user could fall victim to a scam. To not fall victim to a scam, the user can always check to see if the connection to the website is secure via the browser, if the connection is not secure, it is possible someone is trying to scam the user. Users should be cautious which websites they input sensitive information into, as that information can always be stolen and used in a malicious way. If the website is trusted users should still not give out any information that is not required.
