Game of Thrones Season 8 Launch Opportunity for Phishing Scammers
- Multiple well-crafted fake websites target Game of Thrones fans with merchandise and tickets to events.
- The websites look like the real thing but are actually phishing or spamming platforms.
- What differentiates legit sites from fakes ones is the way they treat fan communities.
As we warned at the start of the month, popular TV series like the Game of Thrones constitute an excellent chance for scammers who take advantage of the viewers’ craving for the content to spread malware. It is this insurmountable longing that makes people careless, downloading anything in the hope of watching the latest episode of their favorite series. As the Game of Thrones season 8 has just premiered, scammers worked long hours to push their phishing campaigns out there, baiting unsuspected viewers on their malicious hooks.
According to a CheckPoint researchers’ post, phishing websites themed after Game of Thrones are springing up like mushrooms after the rain, with many of them trying to trick people into believing that they won something valuable. As it’s all about the Game of Thrones series, relevant merchandise, and special gift packs are often used to make up the bait, urging people to enter the fake competition by filling out a basic form. After having entered the name, email, phone number, and company, the participants receive a “winning message” which asks for even more sensitive information, supposedly required to claim the prize. Other sites collect the data to use them in spamming campaigns and just announce a fake winner on the competition page.
Another category of scammers create fake Game of Thrones merchandise stores and collect the credit card details entered by the buyers in the payment page. Now, if you take a look at one of the fake online shop examples which are “gameofthronesofficalshop.com”, you may find yourself having trouble figuring out whether it’s real or fake. However, you may notice the typo in the URL, and you may notice the redirection. Diving deeper, you will see that the Facebook button on the bottom of the page leads nowhere, so there’s no Facebook page, and this is the key element that gives them away.
Legit sites pay attention to their community and fan pages, actively curate them, and organize their structure to help them flourish. Fake websites don’t maintain fan communities, while paid likes and followers are easy to distinguish. This goes to show that seeing an “https” and a padlock icon with a valid certificate doesn’t mean that you have landed on a safe website for sure. Confirm the domain, check the social pages, read the terms, and look for signs of scamming everywhere you can. Here is a full list of the sites that CheckPoint confirms as fraudulent:
gameofthrones\.pro
gameofthronesgamer\.com
gameofthronesof\.com
gameofthronesseason8online\.net
gameofthronessaison8stream\.com
gameofthronesratings\.com
gameofthronesconquesthacked\.top
gameofthroness\.club
Watchgameofthrones\.info
gameofthronesstreamingita\.com
gameofthronesil\.com
gameofthroneszone\.com
gameofthronesneon\.com
gameofthronesgifts\.com
gameofthronescastle\.com
gameofthronesfandom\.com
shopatgameofthrones\.com
idolovegameofthrones\.com
gameofthronesapparel\.com
thegameofthronesparty\.com
gameofthroneskeychains\.com
gameofthronesofficalshop\.com
gameofthronestreasureshop\.com
realgameofthrones\.com
officialgameofthrones\.com
gameofthronesblog\.com
gameofthroneseason8episodes\.com
gameofthronesseason8hbo\.com
hbogameofthronesseason7\.net
gameofthronespredict\.com
Have you ever fallen a victim of a Game of Thrones-themed scamming campaign through a website that is not listed above? Share the details with us in the comments section below, and help others stay safe by sharing this post through our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.