Surprised I don’t hear about this scam more often. It’s not exactly widespread but it is significant. It usually involves a page advertising a free product such as Robux (seems to be the most prevelant one), and after a fake loading page gives you a “captcha” where you have to complete offers to continue, and obviously you don’t get whatever they said they would give you after. Sometimes these are simple things like installing an app from the Play Store, other times they’re worse such as forwarding you to unending surveys.
Seems fun to waste their time by populating their forms with bogus data, but the thing is I’m not exactly sure how the cash flow is working on the back end.
(The following is just a guess) It seems that there’s a network of scam advertisement networks (as in they permit scam advertisements on their platform), so I guess they pay the scammers with the site with the fake captcha? Maybe populating them with bogus data could get them into trouble with the scam ad network?
Welcome to the community.
The ad network they use is called CPABuild. I’ve looked into this before. I have a burner account on CPABuild, but I’m not sure exactly what to do about it.
I actually found one CPABuild user created a scam targeting pedophiles. They made a fake thing pretty much saying they’re giving away hundreds of terabytes of child porn. I eventually reported it to AWS (host of that one particular CPABuild instance), not to protect pedophiles, but 1) because it might give a chance to put a dent in the big list of sites that CPABuild gives out if you can report it for child sexual abuse, and 2) because I don’t want them encouraging pedophiles to keep looking for crap.
CPABuild is a CPA (cost-per-action) ad network. The way it works:
- Advertisers advertise their offer (usually a scam) on the network
- Publishers add scam codes to their site (such as Robux generators)
- When users come upon the publisher’s site, they see the captcha, waste their time doing surveys, sweepstakes, and app installs.
- Publishers get profit.
In short, the publisher gets paid AFTER the offer is completed. Types of offers include CPI (cost-per-install), Phone Submit (Phone number required), CC Submit (Credit card required), and more. It’s honestly one of the worst scams ever, and little kids playing Roblox fall for it a lot. The creators somehow advertise them on university/college websites (I once found one on a local university’s website) and they get indexed by search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Regarding the captcha scam, veriCAPTCHA is made by CPABuild, and another fake reCAPTCHA by OGAds that displays "error: disabled due to high server load when you click on refresh, audio, or info looks like reCAPTCHA but says CAPTCHA, and terms and privacy links get redirected to Google’s real policies.
I have CPABuild too! For the captcha scams though they probably use OGAds.
Yes.
Pleasant Green did a video on RewardZone, but that only touches the surface.
RewardZone gets most (all?) of its traffic through CPABuild. CPABuild did not approve my account until I specified that I was referred by blackhatworld.com (questionable forum that claims they only participate in legal activities) and gave a “real” phone number (that actually belonged to a random stranger).
I have also tried to complain to the NY State Attorney General and FBI regarding RewardZone, BlackHatWorld, and CPABuild (RewardZone is an LLC registered to some random attorney or virtual mailbox or something in NY). The evidence I gave got me an auto-responder and no clear action.
BlackHatWorld is basically a forum on BlackHat SEO Techniques. This means getting traffic through illegal or unethical methods.
Yeah, pretty crazy there is no legal action taken regarded it. And lol yeah, like 99% of the search results when I was searching for a pdf of a textbook I needed were this kind of thing, almost all on college websites. Really is one of the weirdest things ever. Does anyone have any ideas how they get onto there? Maybe people with access to college websites can get paid a lot to post them?
REWARDZONE IS LITERALLY THE BIGGEST SCAM SWEEPSTAKES SITE! Once I put fake info in their sweepstakes, they made you take a survey and do offers to claim your prize. Their terms even say that they will request your ID to claim your earnings. They appear to operate in US/Canada and work on multiple domains. Literally the most absolute BS in online sweepstakes scams. Their BBB reputation is horrible, people complaining about not getting paid and shit.
Yes, I can see. The BBB says they’re up to no good as well.
There is also white-hat SEO there. Many people there claim to never break the law, but I wouldn’t really agree with that.