Bloggers and Publishers Targeted By Advertising Hoax
By Anna Johnson on November 9th, 2009Here’s the latest kind of phishing scam: fake advertising sales reps promising to buy ad inventory on blogger and publisher sites… whose fake ads crash readers’ browsers and even install spyware!
Gawker Media is the latest high profile victim of such a scam. Fortunately for us, Gawker also shared the emails it got from the scammers with Silicon Alley Insider. Check out the link for the entire thread – it makes for fascinating reading and goes to show how savvy these scammers are… and how you really need to be sceptical of everything that comes into your inbox these days.
Essentially, the scam embroiling Gawker involved a fellow called ‘George Delarosa’ who said he worked for Spark-SMG on the Suzuki account (even though Suzuki very recently switched agencies). In his email to Gawker (sent from ‘@spark-smg.com’ rather than Spark’s real email address, @sparksmg.com) George said there was a limited amount of money left in the Suzuki account, which they needed to quickly spend.
Using all the right online ad sales lingo – such as ‘eCPM, roadblocking, RON, IAB sizes, IOs, lead generation, traffic coordinators’ – George appeared to be legitimate. He even included full contact details in his email – email, telephone and Skype handle, etc. Chances are that whoever George really was, he probably worked in ad sales previously.
Apart from the incorrect email address, Gawker reckons the thing that should have tipped them off was that George asked them to use their own IO (insertion order) template, whereas most major agencies have their own.
Phishers are obviously getting more and more sophisticated these days and it behoves us all to be more on our guard than ever…
