Warn your kids: Neopets Scam

[Waylon]

If you have children that play on the popular virtual world game Neopets, you might want to warn them of a social engineering scam gleefully targeting 12-year-old kids (http://blog.spywareguide.com/2009/06/hackers-target-neopets-users.html).

The scam is based around one of the core mechanics of Neopets: kids love rare items and things that nobody else has. Neopets has magical paintbrushes (http://www.neopetshive.com/Hive/newbies/paintbrushes.htm) - stay with me on this - and they're rather hard to get hold of nowadays.

Neopets users looking for rare items are sent private messages from the scammers, who direct them to sites hosting keyloggers & trojans.

They then use the infected PC as a means to get to data the parents might have stored there, be it credit card details, Paypal accounts or online banking.

Seeing the screenshots of some of these people talking about putting these children into botnets is just unbelievable— if ever you wanted proof that people up to no good online will go to any lengths to get their hands on some money (or even just feel good about outsmarting a 12-year-old), here it is.