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March 13th, 2009

A Silly Little Scam Thing

So I was browsing the MySpace page of a band (truly), and came across a number of comments like this:

I think you’ll like this. It’s cool but a little creepy too haha. You need to follow these directions EXACTLY to get the correct results. Put the following into the address bar of your web browser. Type your favorite number between 1 and 999 and then type a dot and then type your favorite color and then type a dot and then type one word that best describes your mood and then type a dot and then type the word (deleted – scammy domain name) and then type a dot and then type com and then click enter. Let me know how it turns out for you.

As someone who understands how the web works, this is maddening. It’s a tiny scam that plays off of “cool memes” – and does it well until you get to that whole “oh and here’s our stupid domain to enter” part. I suspect that there’s a simple script on the other end that just echoes out what the user typed and helpfully installs some spyware or something.

Grrr, I say! Grrr!

Posted in Technology

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