Neopet Phishing On The Rise

Not content with scamming retirement funds from 85 year old widows and widowers, it seems that internet scumbags have taken to stealing hard earned neopoints from little kids as well.

See, people who play with Neopets tend to be young children, 90% of which are in the elementary school range. They collect, trade and earn points with which to "buy" rare items and articles of interest with which to gussy up, feed or otherwise care for their Neopets.

Apparently, scammers have discovered that there's a lot of value phishing on Neopets sites and forums, offering items such as magical paintbrushes - a hot commodity - and other hot items in order to get the kids to click on external links and unknowingly download trojan horses. As you can imagine, this can lead not only to kids losing their Neopets points, but to their parents possibly having their credit card info, bank account numbers, etc. totally jacked.

Wave goodbye to your rare items, kids - and you didn't want your XBox Live account (that potentially has credit card details attached to it) anymore either, did you? The attackers then use the familiar tactic of taking a previously trusted source and using it to attack their friends & other newcomers to the site. Alongside hanging out in the handily labeled "Newbies" section and spamming messages, they'll also post fake "It worked" messages from compromised accounts to the forums of threads started by the attacker, much like people do on Youtube to give the impression that fake programs actually work (scroll down to "positive comments").

And the evil doesn't stop there! According to the first comment at the post I linked to earlier, there's a World of Warcraft-like after market for leveled-up Neopets and points, so the kids that fall for these scams might not only lose some of their points, but could potentially lose their beloved Neopets as well. The thief might then turn around and sell the innocent cyber-creature on another site, rendering it lost to the original owner forever. It's like a Lifetime movie of the week, but starring weird little mash-up critters instead of Meredith Baxter Birney and underwritten by a multitude of parents' financial information.

[via]