iPad 2 and $1,000 gift cards offered by scammers

Typosquatting is often-used tool by online scammers who try to take advantage of users looking for legitimate pages, and a recently spotted spam campaign is employing that technique to redirect users to pages offering big (but bogus) prizes:

The holiday-themed offer asks users to choose among three prizes: a $1,000 Best Buy gift card, a Visa gift card in the same amount, and an iPad 2.

Whichever prize the user chooses, he is required to enter his email address and shipping information (i.e. name and address).

But, if he isn’t careful enough to read the Privacy Policy first, he will not be aware that by giving up this information he is also giving permission to the owners of the site to share it with third parties without needing additional consent.

“Wikipeida-org, wikepedia-org, wictionary-org, wikpedia-com, wikispaces-cm are all domains with a typo that redirect visitors to a ‘you won a prize’ page,” warns ISC Diary “Other prominent typo domains affected include youtrube-com, youotube-com, youzube-com.” But those are not the only ones.

Needless to say, users who fall for it will not be receiving any prizes, so be careful when asked to share personal information online – especially when something is offered for free.