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NewsDaily7.com hijacks BizyMoms.com quality score on Adwords

July 17, 2010 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) 5 Comments

I was doing some research on Google the other day when I noticed that NewsDaily7.com was using the BizyMoms.com site as its display URL in Google Adwords.

I know this situation well, because I’ve had it happen to ME on more than one occasion and it can be a real pain to get Adwords to stop someone from doing it. In one case it took me nearly 2 months to get Adwords to stop the rogue advertiser – and I’ve heard even worse accounts from people I know who’ve had this happen to.

You can see NewsDaily7.com hijacking BizyMoms.com for their Display URL in the video below.

NewsDaily7.com – a fake news site who’s other questionable practices I wrote up in this post called NewsDaily7.com and ProfitGuruOnTheWeb.com is likely hijacking the BizyMoms.com domain to help increase their Adwords Quality score. This used to be a major glitch in the Adwords system and it looks like it may still be there as I’ve seen an alarming number of other advertisers doing the same or similar things.

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Internet Users Falling for More Scams Despite Growing Awareness

January 29, 2010 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) Leave a Comment

According to a recent report at eSecurityPlanet:

“Internet users are more educated and suspicious than ever before but, according to a survey conducted in October for storage software giant EMC’s RSA security division, they’re still falling victim to phishing scams at a higher rate than ever before.”

I’ve seen a lot of cross-border fraud when doing reports at the WorkAtHomeTruth.  And I’ve seen a lot of REALLY smart people fall for the scams.

Now much of the time it is still people who want something for nothing. But at times it’s merely a case of the criminals being very, very good at what they do.

Again eSecurityPlanet reports:

“Law enforcement agencies and security software experts alike are astounded by the growing sophistication and organization of hacking and phishing operations that have managed to extend their illegal operations around the globe.”

Click here for the full report about the increase in internet scams despite the emphasis being put on education.

Related:

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WebRoot reports new way for spammers to promote Google home business kits

October 24, 2009 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) 5 Comments

Andrew Brandt, a malware researcher for WebRoot recently wrote up a new way that spammers used Bing to bypass filters by using Bing’s redirection mechanism for their feeds.

Andrew observed that the problem has to do with how the fact that “the clickable links in the Bing feeds the format http://www.bing/news/rssclick.aspx?redir= followed by the full URL of the site you intend to visit” and the fact that
“anyone can plug anything into the end of that URL and it will redirect to that site”.

Click here to read the full WebRoot article – Spammers Use Bing to Bypass Filters, Spam Bad Links.

A trackback link from the WebRoot blog leads to an  October 22, 2009 article from GeekoPedia which includes a quotation from a Microsoft representative who stated,  “We were testing new features to improve the search experience for our customers, and during our testing, we found a bug that was causing this issue. We are taking immediate action and expect a fix in the next 48 hours.”

According to WebRoot some of the spammers were promoting fake news sites like the ones in the WorkAtHomeTruth write-up “Are Fake News Sites the Next Gold Rush?” – a play on the commonly used fake news site headline “Jobs: Is Working At Home Online The Next Gold Rush?”.

The particular product that WebRoot mentions is one of the products calling itself “Home Business Kit for Google” which continue to pop up with new variations almost daily as discussed in Digging Deeper Into Hidden Negative Option scams here.

Of interest is when Adam says, “Personally, I don’t think anyone should be clicking any links received in email messages” which apparently would include even emails for which people have double-opted in including WebRoot’s own email list here. Now maybe that wasn’t Adam’s intent, but that’s how it certainly reads as of now. And honestly I’ve told certain people that their safest bet based on questions they’ve asked me at WorkAtHomeTruth is for them to completely disconnect their computer from the internet.

What’s amazing to me is how quickly the spammers were able to exploit the Bing vulnerability.

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