Scammers are now exploiting the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Turkey and Syria by abusing legitimate platforms like PayPal and Twitter to steal donations.
This week, high magnitude earthquakes that claimed more than 15,000 lives, caused extensive infrastructural damage and disrupted network connectivity across the Middle East and Mediterranean region.
The government, businesses and charity organizations have decided to raise funds and aid victims of this disaster. This has become a great opportunity for threat actors to target unsuspecting donors.
Multiple scams running on Twitter and abusing legitimate platforms like PayPal’s fundraising pages to create convincing scam websites and collect donations hoping to aid earthquake victims were identified.
One of the scams, claims to be “Turkey Earthquake Relief” fundraiser on Twitter. To give some credibility, the account retweets updates from established news outlets and government officials.
The threat actors lure the donors to the real PayPal.com website which is hosting a fundraiser page. The PayPal fundraiser had collected a total of $900 in donations, with the creator of the page “donating” $500 to their own “cause” to make the fundraiser appear authentic.
PayPal has not been operating in Turkey since at least 2016. As such, Twitter user accounts with “Turkish” sounding names who claim to be based in Turkey but instead urge donors to pay up via PayPal raise a red flag.
But keep in mind that some legitimate charities operating outside of Turkey may choose to use PayPal, Venmo, and similar payments platforms for genuine fundraising efforts.
In another scam, it was found that scammers were abusing Twitter by flooding replies with their illicit Bitcoin and crypto wallet addresses.
The threat actor controlling a fake Twitter account replies to tweets from prominent personalities and businesses with a huge following to maximize the scam’s reach.
UK government has urged public to ‘give safely’ when supporting global aid efforts in response to humanitarian crises like this one.
Scam like these are convincing because instead of using a separate scam or phishing domain, threat actors use a trustworthy payments platform like PayPal.
Image Credits : Expat Guide Turkey
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