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All the phishing links have the same web design (afaik, to be honest i've only ever seen it a couple of times cause what's the point of clicking the link) and the copy paste text chats are all run along 2 or 3 lines; so clearly there's some association among the endless stream of phishers. Therefore there's like an organisation or a couple of organisations, solely for the purpose of phishing and fencing the phished virtual goods. That's wild.

 

How much can the phishing business really be worth? Do the people using the friend request bots (one phisher explained why he took so long as being because he had a bot to add people) actually get a reward for it from whoever gets the account info and the loot in the end? If anyone has any insight into like how it works in terms of the number of people involved and stuff that'd be cool, I'm just interested in the whole idea.

 

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Arsene Wenger looks on in shock at yet another phisher.

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All the phishing links have the same web design

 

How much can the phishing business really be worth? Do the people using the friend request bots (one phisher explained why he took so long as being because he had a bot to add people) actually get a reward for it from whoever gets the account info and the loot in the end?

It needs to be the same webdesign, they are faking a the steam community design if it looked different then no one would fall for it.

 

Phishing is worth as much as the person who fell for it, however this phishing idea is now known knowledge to the point when most players no longer feel sorry for people who fall for them.

Most people who fall for it are:

1) An idiot, totally download a random rar file and open it. If it was a hack for free hats they wont be spreading it like fire, if they have "photos" of you why would you need to download a rar and then open a .exe file ._.

2) Greedy traders Eg: b/o was 3 buds and a guy tells you to add him for 5 buds, the greedy trader who isnt thinking, quickly adds before the deal is gone. <------main cause

 

As far as i know there as been cases where people crack down on a circle of phishers which may or may not be different people or just one massive alt (there was a guy with 30 alts once sending phishing links). Many hijackers spam a few hundred people and wait for that one idiotsmart person to fall for it, take all their stuff, and they then proceed to try phish their friends as well as spam other people with their fresh new account.

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It needs to be the same webdesign, they are faking a the steam community design if it looked different then no one would fall for it.

 

Phishing is worth as much as the person who fell for it, however this phishing idea is now known knowledge to the point when most players no longer feel sorry for people who fall for them.

Most people who fall for it are:

1) An idiot, totally download a random rar file and open it. If it was a hack for free hats they wont be spreading it like fire, if they have "photos" of you why would you need to download a rar and then open a .exe file ._.

2) Greedy traders Eg: b/o was 3 buds and a guy tells you to add him for 5 buds, the greedy trader who isnt thinking, quickly adds before the deal is gone. <------main cause

 

As far as i know there as been cases where people crack down on a circle of phishers which may or may not be different people or just one massive alt (there was a guy with 30 alts once sending phishing links). Many hijackers spam a few hundred people and wait for that one idiotsmart person to fall for it, take all their stuff, and they then proceed to try phish their friends as well as spam other people with their fresh new account.

by the same web design i meant it's literally the same thing, not like, they're all imitating the same website. All the ones i've seen have exactly that layout.

 

And yeah no I know how and why phishing works I'm just thinking that if I'm right that there's a sizable organization doing it, which is suggested by how the messages are all exactly the same and the website is identical, it can't just be one user; they'd need help from others, who they'd have to reward and stuff.

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Phishers are, by definition, lazy asses. When you see the same schemes being used by multiple groups/peeps, it just means they are copying whoever came up with the original scheme, not that it's the Russian mob or anything.

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There is at least one main developer - the guy that created the program, the script used by the sites, the scripts used to move items and create bots, etc - and they advertise this program/system in a popular russian hacking board. We already tracked down the forum account/topic used to advertise this program/system. The developers keep in contact with their clients through Skype accounts for support because many of their clients have no idea about web/c/c++ etc programming. This is one of the reasons why the same "page" is used to lure the victims.

 

It's not easy to tell how many people are involved. I'd say there were (are) at least three different "clients" spamming fake steamcommunity links, two from Russia and one from Kazakhstan, and one guy spreading item generator (rootkits) programs. The "explain these images" one is more recent, and probably was devised by the same guy who did the item generator. It is mostly used to handle trade offers though.

 

The problem is that many many people either don't think or don't care about this. They are the reason why this will never end (besides Valve not caring): they are always willing to buy hijacked/stolen items. And most of these people are popular/known traders. They (fences) are far greater in size than the actual phishers themselves. And as long as it is still profitable to all parties nobody is going to ever stop taking part on this.

 

The reason why they add more people now is because we made their lives really hard on TF2OP. And we will keep making it harder as the time goes by. Some of them got really upset and tried to bribe us already with significant amounts of money just to "close our eyes" and let them phish for a longer period of time. No wonder why some reputable go people rogue as soon as the sun rises and the mail arrives.

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Ah I see; thanks for the explanation!

The psychology of, "if I don't buy the hat cause it's phished, someone else will" is gonna be a hard one to stop though. You'd hope that Valve would start to realise that it's kind of a big deal but I guess that would require attention to detail in tf2 trading.

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There is only one way of stopping all the mess they let happen over all these years: restrict accounts to one per person, with ID verification.

 

And we all know this will never happen.

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  • 1 month later...

Hey blue screen, just curious. What is "significant amounts of money"?

 

Several thousand dollars.

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