Members urged to be cautious of scammers sending pop-ups

Post Reply New Topic

I opened Wrong Planet this morning and went to the first page with the "latest active threads" list. I clicked on the Porphyria thread. Immediately a pop-up window appeared with a female voiceover started warning me not to turn off my computer, that I needed to contact them immediately as I was at immediate risk of losing all my financial details and has to provide my password etc so that spyware could be removed before I lost everything.

I turned off my computer, ran my virus protection and Windows Defender.

If you get this, turn off your computer and reboot it from the power point immediately. Then report it to Microsoft if you are using their products.

Others may be able to provide other and better protective advice and steps to take, but whatever you do, don't follow the voiceover instructions.

I also think WP is infected, and strongly urge Alex to make a definitive statement as to what is happening. I have had no reply to my PM, to my email, or the message sent to Facebook over the past couple of months about members' reports of infection here.

Alex as you know, many members have anxiety issues, and the lack of security and risks here are possibly aggravating the anxiety these members are feeling. I am now one of them too. Please action this request, and tell us what is happening and what the recovery plan is, and what the timeframe for that is, and reply asap.

Because of the potential seriousness of this issue, which has been reported by multiple members for weeks now, I am going to cross post this in the General Forum also, despite the cross post rule, because members need to be aware of the risks, and the risk now seems serious enough to temporarily over-ride this rule.

Surely it's OK to cross-post when you're trying to warn everybody about something as serious as this on the site. It is the most decent thing to do.

Thank you so much for warning us. That is very thoughtful of you. Thankfully I do not have any financial accounts online, but others here do and it's a good thing you spotted this malware thing when you did.

You've done all you can. Alex just needs to sort it out.

Thanks again.

Thanks for posting.

Once this is sorted out, we should probably all be changing our password. Most likely, this is just something that just hijacks part of the site content, but it's also possible that the site is totally compromised, in which case things like passwords would be out there too.

I've gotten all sorts of pop-ups and redirects on my phone for a long time now. Usually the phone vibrates and the pop-up redirect says you're a big winner click this. But I've encountered the fake Microsoft voiceover too.

The thing with these, like fake FedEx emails, is they are trying to get you to click on a link or button. When that's done, you've basically opened the door and invited them in.

I don't think anyone hacking your WP account info is going to do much, since it doesn't contain any personal information. I would advise everyone to use an email account that's for WP only and never use your main email address where you get emails from your bank and such. And to use a password that's for WP only. That way if they hack your WP account info, it's just going to lead to a dead end.

However that dummy email account might get a scam email. Might be one claiming to be from WP and will as usual, tell you to click something. Just don't click.

Alex should have fixed this three weeks ago when it was first noticed.

It doesn't bother me personally since I'm on Linux and use a secured browser.

But obviously most people here are running Windows and are therefore at risk. I've made it a habit to tell people not to come to this website for this reason.

I sincerely believe WP is on its last legs. The combination of scam pop-ups, redirects and constant server errors, is going to cause more and more people to give up accessing WP.

And I don't think Alex is ever going to really do much about it, much less any kind of major overhaul. It seems like WP is very much on the back burner for him. So enjoy WP while it lasts or until you too finally get tired of all the problems and give up on the place.

Haven't noticed anything on my Linux desktop, but often get weird pop ups here on my phone with false security warnings of trying to steer me to the App Store with a link to an alternate browser.

Thanks for the warning. Haven't seen anything virus-like here yet, but I've not opened many pages recently. My computer is so old that I can still recover from practically anything by booting up on a flash drive that lets me do a full system restore with Norton Ghost. Not likely to work on a newer device though. I'd definitely recommend NoScript to block everything but the main WP script, if it'll run on modern stuff. I never saw the other scripts do any good, so why take the risk?

It's bad news for WP though.

Have you not got Ad blockers running on the browser? There are many available and will stop you from getting popups and adverts.

You may need several to get everything - we have half a dozen installed and never see an advert or a popup.

Sounds like one of those scam things. It's just a fake pop up. I just close out of the window and get back on the browser. On my phone I have to reset my browser or close out of that page to get out o that pop up.

This is the thing that kept me off the site for ten days recently, until I found the right pop-up blocker. I got what B19 describes, but I couldn't get past the home page until I had a blocker in place. I no longer enter the site through the home page - have another page bookmarked that's stayed clean AFAIK - and I also run malware scanners compulsively.

It's definitely damped my enthusiasm for the place.

Since we are cross posting

I have said it before and will say it again. This software is so down the rabbit hole, it probably needs to be rewritten from scratch or be purchased by another company and their software be modified for us. That might mean a very long downtime with the heavy risk we might get used to life without WP and find other options, but IMHO that that is where we are and have been ever since this software arrived several years ago.

Again WP was unavailable overnight. Looking at the times people posted, WP was unavailable for 8 hours or so. Most other businesses closed or down without warning or explanation as often as this one is (and user-unfriendly as this one is) would be out of business. The only reasons this is still here is the customers have an unusual amount of loyalty due to repetitive behaviors and relative lack of competition.

Maybe the forum is outdated. I know lot of places keep their forums up to date and are constantly changing servers or making updates. I know Alex changed servers once because I remember the old layout. I know another place I go to uses the same server as this forum is hosted on but the layout is all different and they keep up with it to make it runnable and usable for users. They also use donations to keep the forum up. I don't know if Alex still does it.

I've gotten those kind of pop-ups more than once, when I've went to various websites. I usually just close them and run a scan with the anti-virus program I have just in case, but I don't think I've re-booted the computer over it.

But yes never give your details if it looks suspicious.

For about 2 years or more I have had bouts of stubborn pop-ups when only using this site, telling me I've won an iphone, and it wouldn't let me do anything unless I tapped on "claim your free iphone!" which I never did. It actually let me go to my history and I tapped on the last site I was on before the pop-up came up, then as soon as I was back where I was I quickly cleared my browser history and it seemed to do the trick. But it never caused me any further trouble, although it might have done if I had tapped on it to claim this "free iphone".