Indiegogo is a popular crowdfunding website similar to Kickstarter, with the idea being that you post up your idea, set money targets and have people contribute to your project. A bit of an odd location for spammers to pop up on, but…you know…spammers.
As it turns out, Indiegogo is having a bit of an issue with multiple crowdfunding pages serving as nothing more than spam launchpad links.
To name but a few, we have pages claiming to offer up Fear the Walking Dead episodes, a supposed online showing of Hotel Transylvania 2, an E-Book version of the Metal Gear Solid V Collector’s Edition Guide and coverage of various sporting events all doing the rounds.
The pages all have $500 listed as their project goal. It’s remotely possible that an individual might actually end up donating some money for whatever reason, but none of the pages have any donations listed so that’s something at least.
Here’s some examples:
The fake project pages all offer links to external sites, and quite a few of them are plastered with keywords in an attempt to shuffle their way up the search engine listings.
The majority of the landing pages linked from the Indiegogo spam pages lead to survey scams and services which require sign-up – some free, some paid membership. Here’s one from a supposed stream of a sporting event:
Here’s another similarly themed slice of sporting action which leads to a sign-up offering “Games, music, books, movies and more”. Note that although it says “Create a free account”, you have to pay a monthly fee of $2.95 a month:
Here’s an online sign-up page for a service offering the previously mentioned Hotel Transylvania 2 movie:
Elsewhere, we have the supposed Metal Gear E-Book (complete with “Secuity Check” survey):
This is most definitely not how Indiegogo pages are supposed to operate, and some of the additional pages we’ve seen related to the above have already been pulled – hopefully the rest of them will vanish before someone ends up donating some money in the spammer’s general direction.
Christopher Boyd
