A malicious email campaign aimed at iPhone owners is making the rounds this week, using a bouquet of different themes to scam victims, just in time for Valentine’s Day – including a fake dating app.
The gambit begins far afield from romance however, with an email from “Nerve Renew,” claiming to offer a miracle cure for neuropathy. The interesting thing about this is that the email body is a picture, completely static.
“You cannot copy the contents and paste it elsewhere,” according to
a Friday post from researchers at Bitdefender, who uncovered the campaign. “The sender wants to keep us inside the email body, clicking the malicious links inside.”
Those malicious links include a fake “unsubscribe” button at the bottom as well as the link behind the picture – clicking anywhere on the email body, either intentionally or inadvertently, will cause the scam to execute. Clicking the unsubscribe button takes users to a page that asks them to enter their email addresses – likely to validate whether those addresses are actually active.
Once the email body is clicked, the victim is taken on “a seemingly endless redirect loop,” until neuropathy is left far behind, and the victim lands on what purports to be a dating app for Apple’s iPhone.
