Surefire Way to Bring Traffic to Your Website? Spam People with Familiar Emails

Exactly how many notifications arrive daily to that special folder in your inbox intended for bacn messages? Facebook birthday reminders and invitations, LinkedIn groups news, new followers from Twitter, some subscriptions from Google alerts - the list can probably continue for too many paragraphs for anyone to continue reading this post at all. The number of the messages depends on how intensive your use of social media is and how many services you are actually involved with but I don’t think there are many lucky web users who avoid bacn completely somehow.

These notifications have multiple goals and while some of them are actually helpful to the users (well, at least if you care about who follows you on Twitter and when your Facebook friends celebrate their birthdays), in general they all serve the same purpose for their developers: they are intended to enhance interaction between a web service and its users.

Simply put, all these messages are intended to keep people returning to visit a website again and again. No matter what the reason is, their final goal is to make you click that link and arrive to see what’s new or to act on something - and generate those valuable ad impressions to website owners. And this is another thing that all such messages have in common: due to their goal it is just natural that they all have some clickable links that are intended to take you right to the website.

I myself receive about a hundred such messages per day with the vast majority of them obviously coming from a few services that I tend to use frequently. And the most important thing when it comes to such messages is that when you see hundreds of them in your inbox, you virtually stop actually paying attention to them - and simply click the links you are expected to click without thinking or at least reading the text properly. And today I have found out that it can actually be dangerous.

The thing is that I saw yet another message in my inbox with its subject reading the usual “Invitation to join my Linkedbd professional network:”. Now it does look familiar to you, right? Or maybe you can hardly find any difference from what you get in your inbox whenever someone wants to connect to you on LinkedIn? In fact, to me it looked so natural that I almost clicked the link provided - and the only thing that stopped me was that I did not recognize the name yet I rarely get LinkedIn invitations from people I don’t know myself. So I decided to look closer - and was surprised about my discovery.

The thing is that I quickly realized it was a very peculiar kind of a scam. In fact, I first thought the link would take me to some website that is full of malware or sells some meds or doing something similar - a dubious activity that is normally advertised via various spam messages. But no, imagine my surprise when I discovered yet another social network with a resume builder and some guys in proper suits which suggested professional nature of the network.

What’s more, the front page of this new “network” states clearly that the network “is neither affiliated nor related with any other existing social networking web site” which should probably finally make a visitor realize that he or she was taken to the website they did not expect to be taken to - while LinkedIn was their real destination.

I’ve done a quick research for the name of the network and found that they actually have a fan page on Facebook (with as many as 253 fans) and tons of equally spammy links around the web that make me think that the “social network” relies on some affiliate schemes to attract new members - in addition to these fake LinkedIn invitations that are probably the major source of their traffic.

So I guess it is clear that in some situations such lookalikes probably have a chance of drawing quite a number of visitors - depending on how many people they will manage to involve in the invitation process. And while this is the first such example to me personally, I am quite certain the additional uses of those notification emails will soon be discovered by many scammers around the web - and the number of such emails in our inboxes will be growing rapidly.

But the most important thing that we all have to consider is that all the bacn messages are now not 100% safe and we have to be cautious when clicking links - even if the message does not look suspicious to you (and use filters everywhere so that unsorted messages will look suspicious immediately). So now that I’ve seen such messages used to generate traffic for other websites, I won’t be surprised when I see them used to disseminate malware later on and this will be a new form of phishing attacks. So next time that you click a link in a message from Twitter, don’t forget to make sure it has actually arrived from Twitter - or who knows what could happen to you and your computer.