Promotion from the Google Chrome browser, reviews of fraud. A real gift from Google

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Everyone good day and a great mood. I'm here with another offer of free cheese. I received an email with an offer to participate in a competition from aldaniti. Well, well, let's see, we need to check everything.

I went to the site, and there... Well, it’s just beautiful, they offer to immediately choose what I want.

What generous and tempting offers. Well, of course, I didn’t feel shy, I chose a gift and continued on. That's where the fun began. To register and in order to collect my prize, I was asked to indicate my email again (I wonder where they got it from when they sent the invitation to participate). Well, it’s necessary, it’s necessary, we write.

On the next page I was asked to tell you even more about myself, to enter data in order to definitely pick up my gift! Well, let's write further.

After the “participate” button the following popped up.

Well, I think, thank God, all the “formalities” are over and all I have to do is wait for my gift. Yeah, I was daydreaming, let's move on. By the way, I never received an email confirming my registration.

Now I am offered to choose an additional product, which can also be obtained absolutely free. Well, I am truly amazed at the generosity of some individuals. Below you can see what offers they made to me.

And that is not all.

They also offer to return your hard-earned money, but you have to register again

Then they needed to find out why I wanted to learn English language, but before that, no one found out whether I knew any language at all other than the great and powerful one. And do I really want to learn anything at all?

No, we are not talking about a PR update, although Google presented a “gift” there, in quotes, by reducing the performance of several projects. It didn't really affect me, just a little unpleasant. But today is not about that.

I’ll start, perhaps, from afar, so that everything is in order. I have a so-called literary blog, which I run jointly with one more person. So, at the beginning of the year, Google worked on its servers, and the name of the feed changed - the feeds prefix to feeds2. And during this process there was some kind of mistake and mine is quite normal RSS address for the literary blog was forcibly replaced with another similar one. At the same time, a letter of apology was sent to the post office saying “we didn’t mean to, it turned out that way.” technical reasons. Please forgive us and receive a small souvenir from us as compensation for the damage.”

I immediately went to Google and saw that I was not the only one having a problem, but in Google groups one of the employees officially confirmed the information. Therefore, without fear of falling for a trick, I filled out my address information and sent it to the office.

A month or two later I had even forgotten about this incident, or rather, I switched all my attention to another message from Google - I was waiting for the treasured . How one day they brought home an invoice or air waybill (whatever it’s called), where it was indicated that my precious cargo had arrived at FedEx. Which, by the way, should have cost me $25 for shipping costs. The mysterious Electronics: Others was indicated as the type of cargo.

After googling a little more and finding the sender's address, I definitely understood that the package was from Google, but what I saw in some online store frankly disappointed me :) They had simple flashlights, flash drives as much as 128 MB and socks for mobile or players. Yes, I think it would be cool to get some trinket for $25, a couple times more expensive than the cost. But on the other hand, this is a package from the states + some kind of experience or something. Therefore, having previously agreed, I went to FedEx to receive my priceless cargo.

To my surprise, the box was not small and not so light. Arriving home, I found the following:

First a general view...

A box in a box and another in a box - it’s like a trick)

Gothic box

...and it contains a webmaster's travel kit!

So that everyone knows who I work with :)

In short, it was in the set wireless mouse, handle, usd hub (thing on the right) with 4 connectors and an adapter. In principle, not bad :) It will be useful on the farm.

Tomorrow, by the way, I will also go to a seminar on the methods and nuances of promotion in the bourgeois internet, I will learn smart things, plus I will get some information for my projects and new blog posts. So stay tuned.

Letters notifying you of a lottery win appear with enviable regularity in our mailboxes. All of them are built on the same principle: the user is informed that he has won a huge amount in a certain lottery and must contact a certain official from among the organizers in order to receive it. Tempting. Alas, these notifications are just .

To receive the “winnings,” the user will be asked to deposit from several hundred to several thousand dollars into the specified account under one pretext or another: this could be a commission for transferring winnings, a tax, a fee for opening a bank account, etc. These expenses often seem insignificant to the “lucky” person compared to the amount gained. But after receiving the money, the scammers simply cut off all contacts, and it is almost impossible to find them.

Be careful and don't fall for the scam!

Signs of lottery fraud

How can you tell if you are receiving a letter from a scammer?

The answer is simple: any notification about winning a lottery that you did not participate in is fake.

At this point, the reader may ask a question: what if I really participated in the lottery and hope for a big jackpot?

If the prize draw was actually held and you actually participated in it, you will be contacted by name (or the number of the lottery ticket you purchased) and the letter will contain the address and name of the company organizing the draw.

Fake win notifications can look different. Many are written with gross mistakes. By this sign, you can immediately distinguish a fake, since serious companies that operate lotteries employ editors and copywriters.

There are also fakes that are written without errors and beautifully designed, but they were sent from a public mail server like gmail.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com. However, a message from a serious company is always sent from a corporate address.

In some fakes, you will be asked to send a response to an address different from the one from which the letter was sent, for example, to the address of some “agent” or “manager”.

In other words, there is bound to be some strange inconsistency in a fake notification.

Congratulations...

Here are the most typical, in our opinion, “lottery letters” - with the most typical tricks of scammers.

European lottery... in Nigeria

One letter reports winning the “European lottery”:

“Your address has been selected for a five hundred thousand dollar prize in the 2011 European Lottery. To claim your prize, please contact our agent in Lagos, Nigeria. Contact person: Mr. Marshall Ellis, e-mail:<…>, telephone:<…>.

Congratulations!
Vincent Kilkenny (coordinator)"

The words “Your address Email was selected" or "Your address won" is a clear sign of fraud. You didn't provide your email address for the prize draw, did you? (And if they provided it, it was unlikely to be for the European lottery).

A request to contact , who for some reason uses an address on the public service live.com, could confirm us in the idea that this is spam, if we had not already realized this: after all, lottery organizers do not give out their private addresses in letters sent to participants lotteries. All correspondence of this nature must be sent by corporate addresses. Also, if the lottery is European, then why does Mr. Ellis live in Nigeria?

Well, particularly meticulous users may be curious about the domain euroonlinelottery.com from which the letter was sent... You guessed it: such a site does not exist. The browser will redirect you to wn.com (World News). Alas, there is no lottery at this address. And it wasn't.

Lottery without the knowledge of the participants

The second letter promises winnings in the Coca-Cola lottery, but for some reason it was sent from the French Yahoo! server:

If you ignore some stylistic errors, the translation will be like this:

“Dear winner! This is an invitation to the winner from the Coca Cola promotional lottery. Please contact your Prize Manager, Dr. Greig Williams, for instructions on how to claim your prize this week. From now on, you will receive our promotional offers and invitations to participate in Coca Cola surveys. (You can unsubscribe from them at any time.) We would like you to suspend your skepticism as this prize is truly from Coca Cola, England. The most important thing for us is to notify you that you have won the sum of five hundred thousand British pounds in this draw. Please make sure you receive your prize promptly. Congratulations! Online Coca Cola Company.”

As we see, some scammers calculate the reaction of their victims and, just in case, explain to them that a lottery without lottery tickets is not a scam at all. Here is another example, probably extremely convincing from the point of view of its authors:

We won't translate this in its entirety. long message, supposedly sent by Google, let's just pay attention to the second paragraph. It says: “The online drawing was conducted using a random selection email addresses from an exclusive list of addresses of individuals and legal entities, collected using advanced computer searches on the Internet. However, no tickets were sold and ticket numbers were assigned to addresses to maintain representativeness and confidentiality.”

Big names

It is easier to force the victim to take the bait if the “lottery” is held on behalf of some well-known organization. For example, the same Coca Cola or Google. And it could also be BMW, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Yahoo!.. Unfortunately, these companies cannot do anything about unknown scammers using their names for their own purposes.

The letters talk about lotteries held by large companies; the files attached to these letters contain regular messages about “winnings.” I wonder why representatives of all these companies send letters from public postal services like Gmail and MSN?

If you receive such a letter, go to the company's website to make sure that no lottery is being held there. And if you enter the words “Coca Cola lottery”, “Yahoo lottery”, “Google lottery”, etc. into a Google search, you will see links to articles describing this type of fraud, with examples of messages and even stories of victims of fraud .

Mine is yours don't understand, or Lee Chin

Service Google Translate made life extremely easier for online scammers: if before they the target audience was limited to their compatriots, now letters can be sent all over the world. We regularly receive such notifications in broken English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Polish, Norwegian and other languages, not to mention Russian.

Here are examples of joint creativity between attackers and an automatic translator:

We, of course, do not assume that any of our readers would think of considering such a creation of computer-linguistic technologies as a real notification of a real win, but just in case we urge everyone to be vigilant. The organizers of real lotteries will not distort Russian or any other language in this way.

Be carefull!

Examples of letters with fake notifications of winnings can be given endlessly. According to Kaspersky Lab statistics, the number of such notifications in spam ranges from tenths of a percent to three percent, which is thousands of letters per month. To avoid becoming a victim of scammers, follow simple rules security:

Do not believe that you could win a cash prize in a drawing in which you did not participate.
Do not trust letters that have been “run” through an automatic translator or simply contain obvious errors.
Pay attention to the e-mail from which the message was sent: lottery organizers do not send letters from free mail services.
If you think that everything is in the letter we're talking about about real winnings, check all data using search engines. The names and phone numbers of the senders, the name of the lottery - all this can probably be found on the Internet with detailed comments.
And most importantly, remember: free cheese only happens in a mousetrap!

The topic of today's revelation is scam Promotion from Google browser Chrome, reviews of the fraudulent scheme, the essence of fraud and facts of deception. I will tell you why you were not among the winning users and you have no chance to get from $50 to $3,000 within a few minutes.

How many people were cheated out of a promotion from the Google Chrome browser?

The program is the creation of a fraudster luxtorg. The scammer has loaded his website http://browserupgrade.space/(address may change) to the payment acceptance platform E-Pay.club and began actively promoting it. His efforts brought impressive results. According to statistics, IN JUST A WEEK, 110,955 users went to the divorce page! Of this number of people, fortunately, only 1,368 turned out to be completely naive. It was they who enriched the scammer by 398,169 rubles.

What is offered in the promotion from the Google Chrome browser

Fraudsters report that they allegedly represent the browser development team Google Chrome And are holding a promotion in honor of updating to version 66. And to celebrate, they're giving away $1,500,000 in prize money to the first 10,000 users.

IN new version Supposedly there is FastSite technology, which helps to load pages faster. Everything written is complete nonsense. Firstly, the exact name current version browser - 66.0.3359.139. Secondly, FastSite technology is designed for fast website development, not page loading. Thirdly, try opening the scam site through a different browser: yes, you will be a winner again.

What is the essence of the scam in the promotion from the Google Chrome browser

All you have to do is click on the Find out the winning amount button, and the scam will start. First, you will be pleased with a message about winning $2,195, then you will be transferred to a chat with a non-existent operator Elena Novikova. And finally, they will say that to withdraw your winnings you need to convert dollars into rubles and pay 162 rubles for this.

If you fall for it, the scammers will then demand 450 rubles for activating a transit account, 710 rubles for registering a win, 990 rubles for connecting a secure communication line, 690 rubles for obtaining insurance, and so on. Even if you list everything, they won’t give you any winnings.

Evidence of fraud in the promotion from the Google Chrome browser

A fictitious action. There is no trace of any Top Ten promotion. Certificate of registration No. SMO-42393 dated 03/05/2018 is also a fake.

Fake contacts. Address Russia, Moscow, Presnenskaya embankment, 4с2, office. It’s not clear whose 710 it is. However, this is not so important, because the indicated office has nothing to do with scammers. Support [email protected] They have the same scam: either they won’t answer you, or they’ll write to you from scammers.
False messages about conclusions. All the pop-up windows on the site where user names and the amounts of their prizes are indicated are another scam.
Delusional evidence. Have you ever received a browser update certificate before? Of course not!
Fake reviews about the promotion from the Google Chrome browser. The scammers were so confused that they even translated the enthusiastic ode to themselves through a translator into Japanese. But this does not negate the fact that all the reviews about the promotion from the Google Chrome browser are fake; they were written by the scammers themselves.

The promotion from the Google Chrome browser is complete nonsense! No one will pay you money for updating your browser to a certain version, never believe in such a thing.

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Yes, almost always this is a deception and a scam for money.

Those who hold “competitions”, “iPhone giveaways”, “promotions” on VKontakte, Instagram and other social networks, publish ads like “I’ll give it away for free, I’ll give it away for a repost, I’ll choose a winner at random” are scammers in the vast majority of cases.

The deception scheme is simple:

A competition, drawing, lottery with tempting prizes is announced (iPhone or other smartphone, tablet, laptop, game console, hoverboard, headphones, camera).
Naive people repost or write in PM to scammers that they want to participate.
They ALL get the answer that they have won, they are ready to send the prize, they just need to pay for shipping, insurance or something else.
After payment, the victim’s page is blocked so as not to be bothered by questions about when she will receive the prize.

Often scammers don't even run "contests" but simply send messages to people saying "I chose you as the winner" or "the system chose you as the winner." It's just bait for suckers. There will be no iPhone.

Report scammers using these instructions: How to report a person or group on VKontakte and mark incoming messages about winnings as spam. We will tell you more about how you are deceived below.

How to understand that they are scammers?

If you “won a prize” and they demand money from you for shipping, delivery, for reservations, to pay taxes, customs duties (customs clearance), insurance, and for some other services - this is a deception and a scam. When it's written “Delivery of the prize is paid by the winner himself”- there is nothing to catch there. If they write "Delivery at my expense" they will ask you to pay for something else. They convince you that you are obligated to pay gift tax - when you receive the gift, then you will pay it (and in any case, not to the scammer). Money is usually asked to be transferred to a Qiwi wallet, Yandex wallet or by card number. Scammers are almost always in a hurry. For example: “If we do not receive proof of payment within two hours, we will select another winner.”

A typical fraudulent VKontakte prize draw:

Never transfer money to anyone in advance. Don't believe what they write to you. If you want to please someone, pay for delivery when you receive the package.

Sometimes they offer to pick up a prize in another city for free - this is a scam, because you won’t go there. In addition, the address they provide is the registration address from the passport that the fraudster is presenting as his own. Even if you get there, at best you will find an unsuspecting person whose passport photo has gone viral on the Internet. In general, scammers persuade you to transfer money for “delivery.”

In groups and on the pages of scammers, there are often photographs of lucky winners of prizes and their reviews. In fact, the photos are collected from the Internet or from other fraudulent groups, and the reviews are faked. If the group says "Verified group"- it’s the same as if you write on a fence "Checked fence."

There are statements like « This draw passed full check by the Administration of the largest group, I will give it for free and has complete trust to the host of the competition" or “This competition is being verified law enforcement agencies» - this is just verbal diarrhea to lull your vigilance.

Also, scammers often post as if your photos, photos of the prize in the background of your page, passport photos, TIN, OGRNIP certificates and others “as a guarantee.” But you don’t know who’s really sitting there. There could be a convict in prison holding a dozen “contests” at the same time, or there could be a little girl who is just learning how to cheat. And the documents may have been circulating on the Internet for many years. The passport they show you is not the passport of a fraudster! A photo of a person is also not a photo of a fraudster! These are documents and photos of completely strangers, often deceived, who were asked to send all this “to get a job.” Having taken possession of copies of documents, scammers create pages on behalf of real people, and they don’t even suspect it. Making a fake page takes five minutes.

When you see photos of prizes in the background of the screen with open page scammer on VKontakte, most often a photo of the page is “pasted” there in Photoshop. Look - two identical photos, and on the screen different pages scammers:

But even if the scammer took a photo of the iPhone specifically for you, your chances will not increase.

How can I use my head and make sure that I am being scammed out of money?

Here are some additional signs that will help you recognize a scammer:

The page was created recently (see the date of the first photo uploaded). But some work from old pages.
Comments on photos and comments on the wall are closed. You won’t be able to write “Give me my money back” on his page later.
Look at a person's friends and what cities they are from. Don’t be shy to ask one of them if he knows this person (although you may end up with fake friends).
Ask other people who reposted - did they also write that they are winners?
Advanced method: do an image search from the scammer's page on Google or Yandex - you will find some of them in other places on the Internet. And photos of prizes, and passports, and joyful “winners”.

Use logic and common sense. Look, here is a man writing that he will give away his iPhone for free to a random person because I bought a new one. Would anyone do that? He would sell it through an ad on the Internet or give it to a relative, but donate it to someone unknown, and even send it by mail? For what?

Or, for example, in a group they write: “Today our group turns 5 years old, on this occasion we are organizing a big raffle for Apple products - 32 winners!” Believe me, they don’t even have money for one iPhone. Groups and publics most often earn very little. Most likely, this is some poor student who cannot pay his loan and decided to warm up the suckers on the Internet.

It happens that “disposal of old iPhones from the warehouse” is announced. Why would anyone give away iPhones from a warehouse, even old ones? They cost money anyway.

After all, think about it: if someone is playing a prank, giving away an expensive phone or several phones, wouldn't they have a relatively small amount of money to pay for shipping, insurance, or something else?

The instructions you are reading now are read by 4 to 7 THOUSAND people every month. Are so many iPhones and iPads given away for free every month? And these are only those who thought to search the Internet to see if it’s worth sending money to scammers! Well, or at least what to do when you’ve already sent it.

Conclusion: Don't be naive and don't send your money to tricky people. You won’t see them (nor will you see your “prize” in any case).

One of the victims:

Some group wrote to me on Instagram from Moscow that I had won an iPhone 7, at first I had doubts, but I often participated in such sweepstakes, once I actually won a handbag, and therefore I believed this group. To be sure, they sent me a passport and some kind of tax document. They wrote to me that the total cost for delivery is 2000 rubles. And express delivery by courier within 3-6 days. I paid in Qiwi wallet. Then yesterday they said another 1,500 rubles for the courier, I still paid, but the number was different. So they deceived me and I gave them 3,500 rubles. Blocked on Instagram. What can I do to get my money back? Help...

I supposedly won an iPhone. They asked me to pay 2100 rubles for the flight. Sent. A day later they said that there was some kind of problem at customs and they still needed 900 rubles. I refused to send, citing lack of money. They said they would come up with something. Today, on the 3rd day, I left and contacted them again. They said that I would receive everything, but with a delay. And now I see that the page and group are blocked. The money was transferred to Tinkov’s card.

Today I also fell for a scammer. I sent her money. And now I will wait for the iPhone. She then deleted the page. I wrote that I supposedly won an iPhone in honor of my birthday. It seemed strange right away, but I fell for it. It happens... I wouldn’t want anyone else to fall for her tricks and people like her. I wish I could punish her somehow...

And so on ad infinitum.

What should I do if I was deceived? Transferred money. Is it possible to punish a fraudster?

First, complain to the VKontakte administration about the deceiver’s page and his group, if there is one. How to do this is well described here: How to complain on VKontakte (opens in a new window).

Secondly, theoretically it is possible to bring a fraudster to justice, but in practice it is difficult. You need to carefully collect evidence, consult with a lawyer, go to the police or prosecutor's office, waste time and money. Most likely, you were deceived for a small amount, but you will spend a lot more (and it is far from a fact that you will achieve something). This is what petty scammers are counting on - that you will think everything over and not bother going anywhere.

An important point: the last name, first name of the person on the page, his address, all the photographs and documents that you saw - all this has nothing to do with the scammer. These are documents and photographs of completely innocent people who somehow ended up on the Internet. A real scammer His name is completely different and he lives in a completely different place. All you have is the number of the card or wallet where you sent the money (and this could be some leftist person who is simply cashing out money for scammers).

Advice: just be smarter next time, and if your goal is to punish the deceiver at any cost, start by consulting a lawyer or go to your local police officer.