Scammers Employ New Technique Impersonating Dark Web Services for Advertisement Commission

Scammers Employ New Technique Impersonating Dark Web Services for Advertisement Commission

Scammers have channelled their fraudulent tactics to dark web services with impersonation
difficult to detect. According to multiple reports and complaints, scammers have made the
various dark web news and review platforms their new targets, impersonating them to request
money from advertisers for no work done. This fraudulent technique has been around for some
time as most websites have had their reputations soiled and scammers made thousands of
Euros in their name. The recent reports explain why emails from untrusted sources with
monetary requests or referral links must be verified before taking action.

Recently, Dark.fail, a dark web service provider posted on Twitter about having received an email
supposedly from Onion.live. According to the Tweet and the attached screenshot, Onion.live requested
them to make a payment of 0.17 BTC for being listed on their site. Onion.live, however, has no involvement
in the email and can state emphatically that scammers impersonated them to get some bucks from Dark.fail.
In the email, the impersonators forged an advertising contract containing next renewal, status online, payment
the amount, and even added a wallet address and made it looked like it was being sent from the official email of
the site administrator.

The email states that: “We Onion.live promoting a number of onion sites giving minutes to minutes live
status and Trust score have given 100% trust score as per visitors opinion. We request you to pay and
support us for this promotion”.

This is difficult to suspect as impersonated email addresses need critical recheck to establish
how different it is from the official email. Critical scrutiny revealed that scammers used
“admin@on1on.live” instead of the “admin@onion.live”. Dark.fail obviously knew it was a scam
but did not suspect it had come from scammers. Instead, they believed it came from Onion.live
and questioned the credibility of the Onion.live reviews and ratings. This explains how
dangerous and advanced scammers can be.

Scammers also used the name and email of onion.live to request money from another
advertising company. This led to a dispute as the advertiser felt he was being scammed whiles
Onion.live knew nothing about what was going on. It is important to note that the challenge
websites face are not just from hackers with sophisticated tools using phishing links as a
gateway to illegally access an account, but also, the constant impersonation of scammers using
deception to steal and soil hard-earned reputations.

Scammers did not only impersonate onion.live, but also used the name of darknetLLve.com to
scam advertisers in a similar fashion. According to a post Tweeted by DarknetLive, a scammer
hid behind Email@darknetlive.com to deceive and stole thousands of Euros from an advertiser.
They mentioned that the scammer used Namecheap, and protonmail to gain trust to stage the
fraudulent activity. This is very scary as scammers are more likely to impersonate other services
in the future to not only steal from advertisers but to also cause disputes between review
platforms and advertisers.

Onion.live is strictly focused on offering services within the framework of the law. The website
strictly prohibits illegal advertisements or services. All displayed advertisements are scrutinized
and deemed legal. In this case, any illicit activity or illegal calls for promotional funds after being
listed is nothing but a scammer spoofing domain.

Email Spoofing and How to Avoid It

From the above report, it is clear that Email Spoofing is actively being used by scammers for
their fraudulent gain. Email Spoofing is the forgery of an email header to impersonate someone
or to make it look like it is being sent from the original sender. The whole idea of Email Spoofing
is to get targets to respond to the solicitation.

To avoid being a victim to email spoofing, keep antimalware software updated to the latest
release. Also, think twice when clicking on any suspicious link in an email. Another preventive
measure is to set spam filters to the strongest priority. In addition, do not enter any financial
information into an insecure link.

It is important to understand that Email Spoofing can go undetected if not suspected in the first
place. Once suspected, the target can check the email source code to find the original IP
address and trace it to the sender.

Scammers have over the years evolved and come out with a more advanced technique to win
the trust of targets once their old technique is exposed. It is, therefore, important to be careful
with the kind of emails you open and the attachments you download.