Criminals gain as viewers confined at home move heavily onto all the TV streaming sites
Over 700 fake websites pretending to be Netflix and Disney+ signup pages have been created in order to steal the personal information from home-viewers, as the Coronavirus created lock-down creates an intense surge growth in streaming.
Cybersecurity advisers Mimecast has discovered circa 700 highly suspicious ‘scam websites’ that mimic the world’s most-popular streaming service, Netflix, & that first appeared & was noticed between around April 6 & the Easter Holiday period.
Netflix is now fully expected to outpace its own forecast of 7 million wholly new world-wide subscribers, when it announces first-quarter results tomorrow. They are the main ‘go-to’ as millions of new potential users look for original top-quality entertainment, whilst they are being locked-down & utterly bored in their own homes.
Newer player Disney+, who started its international service fully last month by launching in Western Europe’s principal marketplaces, which includes the UK, was ‘cloned’ by 4 new false websites during a 1-week timeframe!
Many of the phoney sites look very, very convincing, & are selling subscriptions / free accounts to gain both personal & also credit card details. However, most are fairly badly designed, & some have language mistakes that very often do arouse peoples’ suspicions.
“We have seen a dramatic rise in suspicious domains impersonating a variety of streaming giants for nefarious purposes,” observed Carl Wearn, who is the Head of e-Crime at Mimecast.
“These spoof websites often lure unsuspecting members of the public in with an offer of free subscriptions to steal valuable data. The data harvested includes names, addresses and other personal information, as well as stealing credit card details for financial gain.” he further cautioned.
Govt. imposed lock-downs that are intended to reduce the rapid spread of Coronavirus have created a huge boost for all forms of TV. Broadcasters in Britain noted a 29 percent increase in viewing over the Easter period, as compared with the same period in 2019, & their subscription services increased too.
The fear that earlier recordings of the most popular shows, such as ‘Casualty’, ‘Coronation Street’ & ‘East Enders’ will eventually run-out for the duration, with new production largely suspended, is causing more people to start re-examining other options in their search for original top-quality programming.
Disney+, whose ever-popular line-up now includes the brand-new smash hit $100m Star Wars live-action series ‘The Mandalorian’, has seen a virtual doubling of world-wide subscriptions to around 50 million in the period from Feb., when the virus outbreak really gripped, until early April.
Netflix, with their 160 million subscribers world-wide, has recently seen a huge market value boost to a new record of $192bn during the global lockdown – which is higher than that of Disney, who are still the world’s largest entertainment company. Such figures, during the scale of the stock-markets of the worlds’ massive collapses in recent months, because of the crisis, are indeed quite remarkable!
“This Covid-19 environment is a bonanza for streaming giants like Netflix,” explained Daniel Ives, MD of Equity Research at Wedbush Securities.
“Tech stalwarts like Netflix and Amazon continue to lead the overall tech market higher as investors realise the strong are getting stronger. While the Covid-19 environment is tragic and has caused a near-term economic collapse, Netflix for now is in the right place at the right time with Disney, Apple, NBC Universal’s Peacock and, soon, HBO Max chasing after this streaming landscape,” Ives further went on to say.
Impertinent Cybercriminals are also pretending to be many official bodies such as the UK revenue service, HMRC, & the World Health Organization (WHO) in sending-forth scam text messages & emails in a serious attempt to shamelessly exploit the global Coronavirus crisis.
In the UK, the dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit, which is staffed by police officers from both of the London forces, the City of London Police & the Metropolitan Police, has actioned searches in Leicestershire, Dorset & South-East London of late, & impounded mobile phones as well as other comm-devices connected to the Covid-19 scams.
“Working closely with the banks & mobile phone companies, we are successfully cracking down on the criminals using the Covid-19 outbreak to defraud vulnerable members of the public,” outlined DCI Gary Robinson. “This sends a clear message to those callously seeking to exploit this national crisis to commit fraud: we will track you down and bring you to justice.”
Whilst we all wish the major entertainment players well, as they rise to the challenge of billions of bored people, the inventiveness, skill and utter heartlessness of cyber-criminals profiting from the suffering & death across the world is, as ever, beyond the rationale of normal decent people!
