A charming new Skype scam

Monday, January 14th, 2008

Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com. → Learn More

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I hate it when people call or chat with me on Skype randomly. I know some people use this opportunity to share stories of their native lands and to brush up on their English, but I use it as opportunity to share pictures of the Lemon Party (don’t search for it. Trust me.) This, however, is a wonderful new method of getting attention by spamming thousands of accounts with fake spyware links and then offering a crazy fake spyware-checking page that ultimately encourages you to pay $16 to buy a full version of some software that is probably free. Very classy!

Interestingly, this just started happening at the end of December. I did a quick whois on the domain and found that it’s protected by WhoIsProof, a masking service. This kind of stuff really burns my beans, to coin a phrase.

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