When customers want to discuss their bills or look for ways to save money, scammers are just a phone call away.
Enter the utility scam, where crooks pretend to be your utility company so they can threaten and extort as much money from you as they can.
This scam has been going on for years and usually starts with an unexpected phone call and, in some cases, a visit to your door.
Obviously the phone call side of the scam is much more scalable and means the scam can be done from overseas.
In a recent investigation, we discovered a prolific campaign of fraudulent ads shown to users via Google searches.
To give an idea of scale, the number of ads we found exceeds what we have found in previous malvertising cases.
Secondly, we've collected and shared as many ads and fake sites as we could in the hope that action will be taken, with hopefully some cost for the scammers.
The scam begins when a user searches for keywords related to their energy bill.
The ads are shown to mobile devices only, which makes sense given how often people use their phones.
We didn't investigate further into the whereabouts and identities of the scammers, but we should note that Pakistan is a possible location.
The utility scam often works by threatening and scaring victims into making poor decisions.
We can usually deduce they are fraudulent by looking up their registration date as well as connecting them with search ads.
That might not be enough to have them suspended without going through the whole process of calling the scammers, recording the interaction and showing that evidence.
This scam is widespread, and so our advice right now is to avoid clicking on any ad from search as the malicious ads largely outnumber the legitimate ones.
Scammers will often threaten to cut your power immediately.
Do not trust any phone number that appears on an online ad. Beware requests for money transfers or prepaid cards.
Scammers tend to be so impatient they will make all sorts of claims to act right now, which should be a dead giveaway.
Contact your bank immediately if you think you've been scammed and wired money,.
Report the scam to the proper authorities, which may be the FTC. Malwarebytes is working with its partners to go after these scammers.
We also provide protection if you are using our iOS app via the ad blocking feature which will disable search ads and other ads that may be targeting you.
This Cyber News was published on www.malwarebytes.com. Publication date: Thu, 15 Feb 2024 17:43:04 +0000