London – H&M is the latest brand caught up in a fraudulent promotional offer on
popular messaging site WhatsApp.
The Swedish retailer appears to offer users a 50 euro discount, but instead
users who click on the ad are charged 4.99 euros every week as part of a
scam subscription.
The faux promo consists of a message coming through a contact in your
address book and invites you to click on the attached link to take
advantage of the elusive discount.
Once the user clicks on the link, they are diverted to a fraudulent website
and asked to complete a form with personal data, including forwarding the
original message to other ten contacts to finally access the “promotion”.
Many international brands have been targets for scam promotional offers,
including Zara, Starbuck, McDonald’s and Ikea.
In many cases users are lured by a series of customised fake surveys that
adapt to the city and language of the user that receives them. It all
starts with a message in WhatsApp that can be in English, Spanish, French,
German, Portuguese and other languages, according to where the IP address
of the user belongs. It offers a voucher usable in the correspondent store,
and the currency also changes depending on who receives the survey.
Image:Fake H&M voucher