Scammers offer users to sell cookies

[Teacher]

Kaspersky Lab researchers have discovered a new fraudulent scheme: attackers create fake exchanges for selling cookies, offering users to put their files up for auction.

Since January 2021, analysts have identified 20 sites written in Russian that posed as such fake exchanges. Users of these resources were offered a generous monetary reward: up to $ 5,000 daily for selling cookies.

If a site visitor agrees to a tempting offer and clicks on the link, they are redirected to a fake page, where a special service supposedly works that allows them to read cookies from the victim's device and helps clean up their market value.

Scammers lure victims with an average of $ 700 to $ 2,000. Then the user is offered to put up cookies for a kind of auction, in which different companies allegedly take part. Fraudsters assure that the data will eventually be sold to the one that offers the highest price.

"If the victim agrees, they are asked to attach their payment details to their account in the system. This is done by adding funds to the personal account balance in the amount of 6 euros, which the scammers promise to return together with the money earned within a few minutes. You also need to enter your bank card details when adding funds to your account. As a result, the user does not receive any payments, and 6 euros and payment data remain with the attackers," explains Tatyana Shcherbakova, senior content analyst at Kaspersky Lab.