Beware scam tells are back

DO NOT CLICK ON LINKS FROM RANDOM PEOPLE SAYING YOU CAN WIN GIL!

Just received from Phae Valentine @Diabolos
"300M raffle giveaway starting in 15mins, post a number from 1-30 on FFXIV forum thread to enter: <links to fake site> "

Looks real has .com-dc.top/ffxiv/forums/#

Tell your FC mates

That's how the cycle of phishing continues, that Phae Valentine had their account compromised because anybody would like to win 300m gil for free. The phishing scam bypasses 2fa as well.

I still don't entirely understand how people fall for this stuff. You'd think MMO players of all people would be wise enough to at least look at random links before pasting them into their browser?

They never left.

The amount of hacking in this game is insane, I still seeing people teleporting right away in main cities like nothing.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

... how people fall for this stuff....

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Greed......

If you're still falling for this stuff in 2024 that's on you tbh.

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Originally Posted by AnnRam

They never left.

The amount of hacking in this game is insane, I still seeing people teleporting right away in main cities like nothing.

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Both are completely different things.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

I still don't entirely understand how people fall for this stuff. You'd think MMO players of all people would be wise enough to at least look at random links before pasting them into their browser?

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Phishing is genuinely very interesting, and I think part of why I find it so interesting is that to understand phishing you need to come face-to-face with the falsehood of some of the myths we're accustomed to believing in our culture.

First off, we can talk about stereotypes like "MMO players". In reality, "MMO players" are far from a monolith. All kinds of people play MMO's, including people who don't know much about internet security. Grandparents who have finally decided to try out this Internet thing, kids who are too young to know better, folks with mental impairments that leave them vulnerable, and of course people who have just somehow fallen through the cracks and never learned about internet security. We've got an image in our minds of what an "MMO player" generally is, and even if statistically that image represents the most common type of player, it doesn't truly represent the whole of the group, which will inevitably be more diverse.

The second thing that I think is interesting is how often we think of people as being static or constant. Like, I think of myself as pretty cautious when it comes to the Internet, so no way am I going to fall for such a scam. And maybe in general that's true! But I'm also a person, and people's capabilities vary over time. If you've had a rough day, if you're sick, if you're distracted, if you're stressed...there are so many things that can come between a person and the level of capable judgment that they are generally capable of. So you don't even have to rely entirely on phishing someone who's uneducated, because even an educated person can fall for a phishing attempt if it happens at the right (or from our perspective, wrong) time.

There's a reason why most companies train and drill their employees about phishing (etc) multiple times a year: because even the best of us can fall for it. At the last company I worked for, I remember seeing the results of an unannounced phishing test, and even a few employees on the IT teams clicked the fake link. Personally, I don't buy that these people were idiots, nor were they uninformed on the subject matter. I think what's far more likely is that they were busy and trying to juggle more than their human brains had the bandwidth for. In their efforts to keep up with their day-to-day, they overexerted themselves and something fell through the cracks.

And I think many of us are at risk of similar outcomes. We're all trying to maintain relationships and responsibilities and schedules and hobbies, and to me it's no wonder that in an effort to try to manage it all we open ourselves up to risk and mistakes. The people who organize phishing schemes recognize this. They know that most of the time, most people won't click. But they also know that with the right circumstances, some people will, so if they cast a wide enough net, they'll catch something.

Anyway, a bit of a ramble, but hopefully some tasty food for thought. ^-^

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

I still don't entirely understand how people fall for this stuff. You'd think MMO players of all people would be wise enough to at least look at random links before pasting them into their browser?

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Players new to online games aren't going to have a clue. They probably aren't aware of how common scamming is until they or one of their friends is affected.

There's little education about using the internet available despite the internet being a normal part of daily life for most people now. When there are no awareness classes or campaigns, it's not that hard to understand why so many fall for the scams.

Did you win the 300m gil though?

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Players new to online games aren't going to have a clue. They probably aren't aware of how common scamming is until they or one of their friends is affected.

There's little education about using the internet available despite the internet being a normal part of daily life for most people now. When there are no awareness classes or campaigns, it's not that hard to understand why so many fall for the scams.

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I miss the days where "everyone is lying to you until proven otherwise" was understood about the internet, even if it was expressed with things like "the women are men, the men are children, the children are cops."

Whenever I get a tell to enter to win 300m gil I just blacklist them.

You guys get tells?

Are people not reading their links anymore? All FFXIV related official Square Enix websites have ".com" in their domain name, not weird stuff like ".com-dc.top". It takes one look to see if the link is legitimate.

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Originally Posted by Allmightpool

DO NOT CLICK ON LINKS FROM RANDOM PEOPLE SAYING YOU CAN WIN GIL!

Just received from Phae Valentine @Diabolos
"300M raffle giveaway starting in 15mins, post a number from 1-30 on FFXIV forum thread to enter: <links to fake site> "

Looks real has .com-dc.top/ffxiv/forums/#

Tell your FC mates

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Been getting these for months.. And yeah they come in waves. Which is also why the launcher/website have an pinned entry "Be Wary of Suspicious URLs and Websites"

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Originally Posted by missTori

It happened to me during shadowbringers. Only because my fc leader posted a link..and i didn't read her post that well. It was something like "hey guys dont go read this crazy forum article" but i didn't realize my fc leader would post a fake forum login link lol.

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Yeah that's because your FC leader had gotten infected.. Those can be damn easy to fall for because it's from an otherwise trusted source. It's when it's some random stranger that suddenly drops you a tell saying like "300M raffle giveaway starting in 15mins, post a number 1-30 on the FFXIV forum thread to enter: <insert fake webadress> That peoples alarm bells should start to ring and have them go "NOPE NOPE NOPE" and then rightclick name then report.

Yea, it's tough on Hali lots of new players haven't seen these before. Just spreading awareness

Yeah, I got one of these tells yesterday. I reported it as RMT. Not sure if that's the right category, but I didn't feel like submitting a support ticket and then typing out a bunch of details.

Yeah, just fell for the exact same thing, "Tia" something was their name and even had an FC so I figured it was legit. Should've had my coffee first. Bad judgment. Password changed. Thanks for the thread!

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

I still don't entirely understand how people fall for this stuff. You'd think MMO players of all people would be wise enough to at least look at random links before pasting them into their browser?

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I believe the reason why some players are falling for this is due to the game being their first MMO. Other players who have grown around playing other and older MMOs such as Runescape would instantly know this is a scam (Likely because it's not their first time getting scammed in MMO as well). Still, without such prior experience, players would become prune to falling for it, especially when this game is very social in comparison to others, and such supposed 'waffles' are not hard to imagine happening around (Which in reality, is not, but that it is easy to imagine it is)

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

I still don't entirely understand how people fall for this stuff. You'd think MMO players of all people would be wise enough to at least look at random links before pasting them into their browser?

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I have some very bad news about the state of humanity for you ...

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Originally Posted by EusisLandale

I miss the days where "everyone is lying to you until proven otherwise" was understood about the internet, even if it was expressed with things like "the women are men, the men are children, the children are cops."

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Somehow in the span of the roughly 20 years I've actively used the internet, we've gone from "don't trust everything you see on the internet" and "the men are men, the women are men, and the 14-year-old girls are FBI agents" to "the government needs to control what people put on the internet because too many people are lying on it" and... well, I'd probably get banned for that other joke.

Point is, IDK why people are still so focused on being a progressive society, when it's pretty clear to me that we've been progressing in the wrong direction for quite some time.

Whenever I get one of those, I just throw on a VPN, open the link in incognito, and drop the entire Shrek script into the fake password field. For reasons beyond my understanding, it seems to bring down the front end of the phishing site shortly afterwards.

EDIT: You can also report them to Cloudflare if the site is using it for DDoS protection. They can't take it down, but they'll put up a phishing site warning for people who try and follow the link.

One of my friends clicked on the link, saw the post, and then tried to login but it kept failing. They changed their password immediately after. Is that enough to protect them? They are freaking out right now. I blame them staying up all night.

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Originally Posted by Lomdi

One of my friends clicked on the link, saw the post, and then tried to login but it kept failing. They changed their password immediately after. Is that enough to protect them? They are freaking out right now. I blame them staying up all night.

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If they logged in via that link, then yes they will have got the password. It's good that they changed the password; however, it's possible they got in and took gil already (they should check this). It would also help for them to enable two-factor authentication (where you have to input a code via phone app on login, I recommend Google Authenticator).

Everyone in the game just now was saying they were getting these tells so they're sending them at the moment.