Compliance Management, Threat Management, Network Security, Privacy

Zero-click fraud scheme ‘subscribes’ Japanese victims to porn service, requests $2K fee

Researchers at Symantec have observed one-click fraud scammers changing their tactics in a zero-click fraud scheme that automatically subscribes Japanese porn enthusiast to adult website services.

When users visit porn sites that purportedly crawl and index porn videos, “the pages automatically jump to the subscription page without any user interaction,” according to a Symantec blog post. “As can be confirmed in the HTML source code, a simple meta refresh tag is used to fetch a different URL following a refresh of the web page after one second.”

From there the victim is confirmed as signed up for the service and asked to pay a fee, which researchers said could be more than $2,000, or call a 24-hour support center to automatically unsubscribe. Symantec researchers noted that the subscription is not real and warned that victims should not call the support center or send email to any addressed provided by the fraudulent sites because the information could be logged for use in future scams. 

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