Smartphones come with a lot of Applications.
It has become trendy to buy a Smartphone with Applications galore, whether one uses it or not, it has become a Status(?) symbol
Knowing this, a scamster sent in advertising SMS to about 11,000 people and cashed in $50,000 in just two months!
Story:
Scam artist ‘robbed’ more than 11,000 users by sending them over eight million advertising messages – which they paid to receive.
A fictitious smartphone application dubbed ‘WhatsAppSpy’ was too tempting to resist for thousands of people who got stung in one of the latest Internet scams. Thanks to their gullibility, a 23year-old in Murcia, Spain pocketed more than $53,000 in only two months.
According to Spanish language news service EFE, the bait was a fictitious application that purportedly let users view messages that others sent via WhatsApp, one of the most popular instant messaging services around. Once the bait was prepared, the fraudster went fishing for fools on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. He managed to reel in over 11,000 subscribers who wanted to spy on the private messages of friends, co-workers, family, lovers, etc. – all ‘in real time, without any problems’ and ‘absolutely free!’
To begin using the supposed spy app, the suckers who swallowed the bait were told to visit the ‘WhatsAppSpy’ webpage to sign-up. Once they did that, they were redirected to another site which asked for their phone number in order to send them a code to download the application directly onto their device. This is where they got hooked: what the user actually did by entering his/her number was to subscribe to a ‘premium messaging service.’ In short, they would pay to receive a series of advertisements with costs ranging from $2 to $10 a message. Of course, a percentage of the money collected went to the conman behind ‘WhatsAppSpy’ for ‘referring’ the users to the ‘service.’
Source:
Ramanisblog 
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