Security researchers have discovered a huge investment scam effort that uses online and telephone channels to target victims across Europe. Since fake investment scams have been around for a while, people are familiar with them.
Over 10,000 malicious websites tailored for consumers in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and the Czech Republic are included in the "gigantic network infrastructure" spotted by Group-IB.
The scammers work hard to promote the campaigns on numerous social media sites, or even compromise Facebook and YouTube to get in front of as many users as they can.
The firm's aim is to mislead consumers into believing they have the chance to invest in high-yield chances and persuade them to deposit a minimum of 250 EUR ($255) to join up for the phony services.
Scam operation
Over 5000 of the 11,197 domains used in the campaign were still operational as of this writing.
It is advisable to check that an investment platform is from a reputable broker when it interests you. It may also be possible to spot the fraud by searching for user evaluations and looking for patterns in a large number of comments.