Scammers love breaking news stories. Especially “juicy” Hollywood scandal new stories.
And it doesn’t get much better than a story that’s headline contains the words hacker, nude, leaked and celebrity.
The reason scammers’ just love these types of stories is because it makes certain types of people much, much easier to exploit. In this case, people who would be tempted at a chance to see an array of A-List celebrities without their clothes on.
This – undoubtedly – is quite a lot of people.
Scammers can exploit these people in different ways, most popularly through social media sites like Facebook and online search engines like Google.
Share-to-watch spam links are certainly going to spread across Facebook and Twitter, leading to websites that will claim to show the “uncensored, leaked photos” just as soon as you share the webpage and participate in spammy surveys to “unlock” the content.
And if you feel compelled to take to the search engines in search for the photos you also run the risk of coming across malicious websites set up by scammers targeting certain keywords or phrases related to the aforementioned headline in a bid to get their malware on to your computer.
Basically scammers will know that a significant amount of people will be looking for specific information/content on the Internet. Scammers use this content as bait for their traps. So don’t be a victim!
On a footnote, this is the latest attack of many in the “nude celebrity” variety. Whilst, at the time of writing, it is unknown where many of this latest and hefty batch of photos were stolen from, it is likely that many were sourced from online “cloud” storages facilities – i.e. the Internet.
So we again reiterate some advice that many don’t seem to take much notice of – the Internet is a public network. The biggest in the world. Nearly everyone has access to it. Whilst you can password protect and secure your corner of it, there is NEVER any guarantees in cyberspace.
Bottom line – the Internet is not the place to store your “nude selfies” or whatever else you don’t want others getting their hands on.
(Planning on taking some naked snaps of yourself? Before you do, read our ultimate guide to taking nude photos. Not as weird as it sounds.)
How do you think scammers will exploit this headline? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading! But before you go… as part of our latest series of articles on how to earn a little extra cash using the Internet (without getting scammed) we have been looking into how you can earn gift vouchers (like Amazon vouchers) using reward-per-action websites such as SwagBucks. If you are interested we even have our own sign-up code to get you started. Want to learn more? We discuss it here. (Or you can just sign-up here and use code Nonsense70SB when registering.)
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