The Pinterest Giveaway Scam got pretty big today; at one point about 10% of Pinterest homepage pins were scam pins. In addition to the Starbucks offer, I counted at least three others — for H&M, iPhone (of course), and GAP.

What fascinates me about the scam is the authors’ crafty use of recognizable social media symbols to create an illusion of authenticity, and — more importantly — an illusion of endorsement. In other words, exploitation of cognitive biases, also known as social engineering.

Let’s take a closer look at the “Starbucks” page (now available at http://giftinterest.com/coffee_4y8l1 but likely not for long). What do we see?

1. Pinterest’s favicon, hotlinked directly from Pinterest’s servers.  Other variations of the scam used Facebook’s favicon.

2. A countdown of “packages remaining”.  The counter resets at a random number lower than 500 (probably between 200 and 500) at the first page load, and then counts down to zero.

3. Fake “Pin It” button with a fake pin count set at 39K. The “counter” is a static gif, shared by the four different scams.

4. Hidden “pinnable” images. If you use the official Pinterest button on the scam page, it will tell you it can’t find images or videos that are large enough to be pinned.  When you push the fake “Pin it” 39K button on the page, the more advanced variations of the scam would serve a randomly selected image and serve it up together with with a randomly selected page URL to appear in the pin description. Here’s one such image from the iPhone/iPad scam site (http://pinterestpromo.info/i/?start).

You’ll see how all these images are hotlinks from Pinterest — they are actual but unrelated pins by the site’s users.  For example, one of the sources is this pin from a year ago, a picture which in turn was pinned from Apple’s site.

5. Friends’ endorsements.
At first, I was puzzled by the pictures of my eleven friends who, it seems, all have liked this site. My first guess was they all got somehow tricked into clicking the Like button during one of the later steps of the scam funnel. I asked a couple of them to go through their recent Like history, and none of them could find a record of “liking” anything related or even remember seeing the scam in the first place.

Look closer at the source code:

These pictures are displayed through a Facebook widget called Facepile, and what these pictures show are the faces of my friends who liked Facebook’s own page and not the scam site (all four scam sites I saw used the same widget and showed me the pictures of the same eleven friends.)  The trick is not immediately obvious because each time you load the page the widget shows a different set of three names and a random sequence of userpics.  

Here, let me try to embed the same Facepile widget into this blog post:

If you are logged into Facebook, you should see pictures of your friends who liked this. What “this” means is left to reader’s imagination.

In other words, anyone can grab a list of someone’s friends who liked facebook.com/cocacola, for example, and use it to fake their endorsement of an unrelated site.

Oh, and the author behind at least one of the scam sites is open to employment offers, with his email address tucked into the source code:

Update: Part II – Social Media for Social Engineering

It started with a tweet from a friend:

Never one to pass a scam, I dutifully clicked and landed on a page with this URL: http://giftinterest.com/coffee_ob9ve

The ticking “packages remaining” counter communicates the sense of urgency.  I am feeling lucky; I am WAY ahead of the Internet crowd. Of 500 available packages, only 74 have been given away and 424 are left. Even if the total number of pins is already in excess of 39K. But who are you going to trust – your lying eyes or an unforgiving counter?

The page beckons: “Pin it”. I pin it. Step 1 – check.

This is my pin. The picture of the coffee cups was not on the page I just pinned. Who cares. Five other schmucks users have already liked it.

I am thinking “Hey, that was easy. I am going to get not just one, but TWO cards”. I open another browser and type in that giftinterest URL again.

Oh, what a stroke of luck. Look, the number of packages remaining – 442 – now is larger than it was a minute ago. Someone must have returned theirs. I refresh the page. The number is different yet again. Eventually, if you let the page just sit there, it will go down to zero. Refresh the page, and it reset to  some random number greater than 0 but smaller than 500.

But whatever. I pin again.

This time, the pinned picture is different.

I figure since I don’t drink coffee anyway two cards are enough. I go back to the giftinterest page and click “Final Step”.

Yes! Here I learn that the value of the card is $100 (but only if you qualify).  The page asks me for my email.

The pop-up window tells me to write “I Love Starbucks” on Facebook. That I can’t do. I love Dunkin’ Donuts. 

The rest of the story is familiar to everyone who has ever taken Free iPad surveys.  You get into the funnel…

… and fill out a bunch of surveys and leave your personal info…

… and at some point you are gently prompted to install some spyware…

Needless to say, it is very unlikely that Starbucks has anything to do with this project. Giftinterest.com was registered on February 24, 2012 in private, and both coffee-blends-now.com and yesusrveymedia.com (the two domains that popped up in various fine prints) are registered to a company in India.

Bonus track:  An identical scam is promising free H&M cards to the unsuspecting pinners.

Update: Part II - Social Media for Social Engineering

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Giant Balloons Offer Many Advantages is a post from: Advertising Balloons

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3. Create a Lasting Impression with Giant Balloons