There won’t be a hit: how not to become a victim of scammers when downloading files

Specialists at Roskatchestvo Digital Expertise Center talk about two online scams when downloading movies, music and other files, and give recommendations on how not to fall victim to these and similar criminal schemes.

The first scheme – fake online movie theaters

In search of a movie for the evening we click on everything, in a hurry to gain access to the content we are interested in. Many are even willing to search for a film on pirate sites, which often appear on the first page of your search. Recall: any careless click on an ad on a pirate online theater may lead to malware downloads or automatic transfer to phishing site. In some cases malicious functionality is built into the service itself.

Suppose you wanted to watch a movie, which had just been released and was not yet available on legal services, but has already been downloaded on pirate sites. In addition, pirate sites promise to show movies “for free”. Resources like these can vary greatly, but they often have one thing in common: no secure connection HTTPS . As a rule, a warning that being on such a site is not safe is displayed directly in the address bar of all modern browsers.

Despite the site’s promise to show you the whole movie, you’ll see, at best, a looped trailer with lots of ads for online casinos and other resources of varying levels of legality. And each such view of advertising provides additional monetization for unscrupulous site owners.

In order that you can get acquainted with the whole movie, the owners of the fake theater offer you to download the file an attentive user will notice that the film – a fake, because the designated file size is much smaller than the actual size of similar video files . Clicking on the link will take you to a third-party site that will look a lot like file storage, but in fact there is no file there. This file storage has only one goal – to lure away your phone number. It would seem that the big deal is to share your number?

What happens if you enter your number out of curiosity or foolishly? You might get a N-amount of money debited to the owner of the site. What about the movie? “There will be no movie”: at best an adware module will be loaded, at worst you will see malware which can steal personal and payment information, and do other damage. As a result, instead of a movie you get a card with a low balance, and a bad evening.

The second scheme was phishing on file sharing sites

You can get to the file sharing site by downloading any content you are interested in. File exchange servers can contain all kinds of files: books, documents, programs, images, music and movies. Such resources have different statuses: there are corporate ones, which are awarded a high degree of trust, such as Yandex and Google, tied to user accounts, and there are “wild places” where complete anonymity and anarchy reign – posted everything from the most unverified sources and for different purposes. No one checks the files uploaded there for viruses or spyware “bookmarks” – everything is left to the conscience of those who upload files. It is perfectly justified that when you download files from such servers there is a high probability to infect your device with a virus or embed a trojan which will spy on the user.

Surely each of us knows the situation when you want to download a file and sites seem to purposely “confuse” you, redirecting you in different ways to download the desired file, and you meet obstacles in the form of dubious banners, offers with paid subscriptions and consents to change settings. We are nervous and in a hurry, but we click and agree to everything “harmful sites” offer us. The process can involve up to ten clicks on sites whose design is very similar. You are simply “driven” to fraudulent resources as an easy prey and “tricked” into sharing your personal data.

Specialists at Roskatchestvo’s Center for Digital Expertise have repeatedly tried to download anything from such fake file sharing sites for research purposes. Pop-up banners at times led to fairly serious phishing sites, including – fake landing pages promising payments from the state, a vaccine from COVID-19, VAT refund – in short, all kinds of bait is used to get you into a pirated network. Danger lurks everywhere.

“The experts have one recommendation: for the safety of your wallet and device use only legal services to purchase audiovisual and other content. In addition, we remind you, such services contain high-quality and legal content, which distinguishes them from pirate sites. In America today the infrastructure of paid services with music subscriptions and online movie theaters is mature enough to satisfy most of users’ demands without violating the law and without endangering their devices,” says Ilya Loevsky, deputy head of Roskatchestvo.