Another scam - Weekly Health USA: Tip of a Flat Belly
Last year, I made a somewhat lengthy analysis of an internet scam ("Google Money Masters"), so I won't go into those details here (plus, I'm at work). But I thought this was too fun to pass up. I was looking for a grunge font for work at urbanfonts.com and when I clicked on the category name, my browser opened another window to "Weekly Health News" showing an article on the "1 Tip of a Flat Belly: A Surprising New Way to Burn Fat Quickly." I have to say, this is a pretty good looking scam.
The first thing that made me wonder is the picture of the supposed reporter lady person. I've seen her all over the web, in suspicious-looking ads. The second indicator was that the article supposedly originated in (guess where?) the city where I work, as well as the example of the woman losing 46 pounds. Try it out - go to the article and I'm sure you'll find that the article magically originated in the city in which you are currently sitting, too! My third source of suspicion came from the comments section. They were all from the last two days. Fantastic. Then last but not least, all of the links on the page lead to an advertisement for AcaiMax. Scroll to the bottom and want to read about football? Too bad, it's AcaiMax. How about Travel, or Racing (which is interestingly enough accompanied by an image of a mountain scape... I guess "mountain racing?")? Nope, AcaiMax again. Then I pulled up the source code and had a good laugh.
The article purports to have been published on July 13, 2010, two days ago. So I look at the code and find a little (messy!) bit of javascript that ends with this:
mydate.setDate(mydate.getDate()-2)
See the "-2" at the end? Yeah, that says to set the date to two days before the current date and show it on the page. This happens several times throughout the page, and is obviously dishonestly reporting the date to make it appear as though the article (and comment section) is recent. Want to post a comment? Too bad, because based on the source code and script, there's nothing actually submitting your comment anywhere!There's more, but I'll stop. I just find it incredibly entertaining to see how the "scam" continues to evolve. This one looks pretty real, if you ask me. But that's the idea - looks are deceiving, and now that we, the Web 2.0 generation, have such short attention spans, the marketers now that we look at the page for 5 seconds and then act. Try to make it 10 and I think you'll see a lot more than they're showing you.
PS To the authors of this page, may I suggest a faster way to build an array, since it looks like you were in a hurry:
var month = [
'January',
'February',
'March',
'April',
'June',
'July',
'August',
'September',
'October',
'November',
'December'
];