Security News > 2022 > August > Researchers Uncover Classiscam Scam-as-a-Service Operations in Singapore

What's notable about this campaign is its heavy reliance on Telegram bots and chats to coordinate operations and create phishing and scam pages.

When a potential victim contacts the seller through the online storefront, the Classiscam operator deceives the target into continuing the chat on a third-party messaging service like WhatsApp or Viber before sending a link to a rogue payment page to complete the transaction.

While administrators are in charge of recruiting new members, automating the creation of scam pages, and registering new accounts, it's the workers who create accounts on free classifieds websites and place the decoy ads.

"Workers are key participants of the Classiscam scam scheme: their goal is to attract traffic to phishing resources," the researchers said.

"After initial contact with the legitimate seller, the scammers generate a unique phishing link that confuses the sellers by displaying the information about the seller's offer and imitating the official classified's website and URL," the researchers said.

"As it sounds, Classiscam is far more complex to tackle than the conventional types of scams," Group-IB's Ilia Rozhnov siad. "Unlike the conventional scams, Classiscam is fully automated and could be widely distributed. Scammers could create an inexhaustible list of links on the fly."

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/08/researchers-uncover-classiscam-scam-as.html