Starbucks Free Voucher Giveaway on Facebook: Scam!

Sat, 08/25/2012 - 12:54pm (12 years 31 weeks ago)

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There's another scam going around on Facebook, this time it's a Facebook scam promising to give away a $100 ("wow!") Starbucks card for free. Amazing huh? They just want to give away tons of money!

Well, as usual, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Take a look...

First thing anyone should do when they come across one of these is to hover your mouse cursor over the link and look at the URL it will take you to if you click it. It should at least point to the website of the company. As you can see in the screenshot of this Facebook scam, this link is pointing to a DropBox file (hxxp://dl270.DropBox.com/s/o5n06d9xqduw7v3/m3.html?kX6BGz3 in this case), which is obviously completey unrelated to Starbucks. That's your first red flag to know not to click the link (and to report the link to Facebook as spam / Malware). If fact, this should be all you need to know to pass on clicking into it.

Should you still end up clicking into the scam link you'll (in this case, since this scam will likely change slightly in the future when people get savvy to this exact one) first be taken to the DropBox link, which re-directs to lovecoffeestar.net; a page designed to fool you into thinking it's still a Starbucks website page, including the page logo, page title and the favicon, with a button to share it on your Facebook wall (to continue spreading this scam). As can be seen in the screenshot there have already been at least 1800+ Facebook users who have unfortunately fallen for the scam.

If you happen to fall for one of these scams you should:

Look through your Facebook apps to look for any new, suspicious apps and delete them; sometimes these scams will add malicious apps that can steal your personal information, post Malware / scams unknowingly to your newsfeed, or worse.
Delete the post from your own newsfeed to prevent your own friends from falling for the scam.
Post a follow-up status warning your friends that you accidentally posted the scam and to not click it, or post it on their own status.
Report the link / status / post to Facebook using the little button to the top right of all Facebook statues.
If possible, report the actual link to any 3rd party service that the scam is using so that they can take their own further action. For example, this scam uses a DropBox account to host it's file for re-directing as was shown in the screenshot; you can report that link to DropBox for them to work their magic, maybe even catching the perp. Any screenshot you may take as proof when reporting will only help out that much more.

Be sure to follow GeekDrop on Facebook to keep on top of all of the latest scams.

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Mon, 08/27/2012 - 10:49am (12 years 30 weeks ago)

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Re: Starbucks Free Voucher Giveaway on Facebook: Scam!

Laughing , and here's how you catch a scammer, or at least the not-so-bright ones (like this guy) ...

When you click the link, if you immediately click your browser's Stop button (or if you have the right addons, disable redirects) before it redirects to the final fake page, in other words, stop it on the page that handles the redirection, then view it's source code you'll see this:

Screenshot:

Or as raw text:

<html prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
 
<meta property="og:title" content="Free $100 Starbucks Voucher - August 2012"/> 
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://dl413.dropb ox.com/s/19hmfqrlf5nayc7/m.html"/>  
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.starbucks.com/static/images/global/logo.png"/>  
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Starbucks"/>   
<meta property="og:description" content="Claim your Free Starbucks voucher now!"/>
 
<meta property="f b:admins" content="prince.patridge"/>
 
<script type="text/javascript">top.location.href = "http://lovecoffeestar.net/";</script>
</head>
</html>

I highlighted the relevant piece of code: the meta property named "fb.:admins" is a Facebook-specific meta tag that tells Facebook who owns the external webpage so that they can view statistics on a Facebook "insights" page, amongst other things. So in this case "prince.patridge" is the guy who created this particular scam. (Click the link on his name for his actual page, and / or click this link to see a screenshot of it Devil ).

Taking the investigation one step further, you can do a Whois (for example using GoDaddy: here) on the domain name that he's using to host the final scam page that gets redirected to: "lovecoffeestar.net", which shows this:

You can see all relevant information on it including the company / companies involved in registering the domain, the date it was registered, in which case was registered literally the day the scam went out onto Facebook, and so on. Btw, while doing this quick sniffing around I was also redirected to another domain he used for this scam: "lolibucks.net". The name itself is a bit creepy ... anyone who's been around the internet long enough knows that the term "loli" usually means "underage girl", and even refers to pre-teen girls for the pedophile loving types, and having the word "bucks" in it seems to infer it's being used as some sort of monetary profit gain, whether getting paid as an affiliate by a porn sponsor or something similar. Another Whois shows it's also owned by the same person, with all matching information as the previous one, including being registered the same day as well:

So I think it's safe to say that following the stereo-typical "scammers and spammers are the lowest of the low", this guy is the bottom of the bucket, and not particularly smart to boot.

Shhh.. dont tell anyone, but we also have a private forum area with the really good stuff, see?