A new Facebook crypto scam, in the form of a sponsored ad, has been stealing sensitive data from users.
The alert was first published on Medium by the ORCA Alliance on Nov 22.
The ad featured a fake CNBC news article and was posted by Lithuanian musician Jonatanas Kazlauskas. It is still unclear if the artist was involved in the scam or if his account was hacked.
By clicking on the ad, users are redirected to a fake CNBC page with an article on how “Singapore, in an unprecedented move, just announced that they are officially adopting a certain cryptocurrency as Singapore’s official coin”.
The article went on to list several celebrity endorsements, including business magnate and billlionaire Richard Branson, while enticing naive readers to invest in CashlessPay Group – the firm supposedly chosen by the Singapore government to create the new cryptocurrency.
The deceptive news article does its best to lead readers to click on a series of other fake pages. First to the CashlessPay Group website, which copies the homepage layout from the ORCA Alliance ICO project. Then, a registration form accessible at the top of the website asks users to fill in their personal data, including email address and phone number.
Once the form is filled in, the victim is redirected to fake cryptocurrency exchange websites.
HardFork was able to identify two of the fake exchanges – Roiteks and CoinPro Exchange. Once on any of the pages, victims are asked to enter additional personal data and credit card details in order to make a deposit. Regardless of the information given, the fake exchanges would always show: “Transaction was not successful”.
Social Media Crypto Scams
From fake cryptocurrency giveaways to celebrity impersonations, Twitter has been the prefered playground for crypto scammers. However, it seems that they have again found a place in Facebook, after the social network reversed its ban on crypto ads back in July.
