Scam – Do not share these messages

There are a lot of scam messages flying around, all over the internet lately, and most people are getting lured into it. They are promised giveaways for sharing links, whiles their data is being stolen. These are a few things to be aware of…

Take note, these messages have been going around for as long as I can remember, but why? Why talk about it now? Well, I’m glad you ask. Just recently a lot of the people in my contact list have been sharing a lot of them with hopes of winning something in return. You know MTN right, arguably the largest telecommunication network in Ghana at the moment, is celebrating their 25th year anniversary, emphasis on 25th. And its very clear, when you visit their official website or even when you open up the myMTN app. If that’s the case, why then are people sending messages like this… It is clearly not a 20th Anniversary, but because most of us don’t like to read long texts, we ignore and click on the link. And after going through those long process and ads, we are forced to share the link with others in order to redeem our prizes.
Here’s another one saying KFC is giving away free meals as part of a 68th Anniversary.
The government giving out free Laptops
Win 50GB if internet data
United Nations awarding scholarships
And my personal favourite, Melcom’s 30th Anniversary Giveaway nad Nestle 150th Anniversary Giveaway.



The problem with this is, each time you visit a website, your IP Address is recorded. That means, the admin of the website has access to your location, the type of device you’re using to visit the website, even how long you stay online. This isn’t alarming if you know the website is secured. Websites, like youtube, google, Instagram, apple, facebook, etc are all safe because they do get your info, but they don’t share them, most of the time.
That’s why it is advisable to use a VPN or Virtual Private Network which will change your IP address, so no one can track you. Perhaps some other time, we’ll talk about VPNs.

Before we can continue, allow me to explain something briefly. There are Web Addresses and URLs, which are basically the same thing but are given different names. If we say a Web Address, we basically mean the official link to a website. For example, facebook.com, google.com, theyolarbi.com, all these are web addresses. Now imagine you search for an item on google.com, when you check the link, you would notice that a bunch of weird punctuations and texts are added to the original link, which is google.com in this case. This whole link with weird punctuations and texts is what we call, URL or Uniform Resource Locator, for locating specific areas on a website.
So facebook.com is a web address, facebook.com/theyolarbi is a URL
Theyolarbi.com, web address, theyolarbi.com/shop/merch/baseball-cap/, URL

Great, we are on par now. The reason I’m explaining this is, most of the links our dear friends and family share are leading to URLs, specific part of a website, which is alarming on its own. The website may not be harmful, but the URL the link is pointing to may be.
Another thing is, other links go through a third-party link shortener. An example of this is cut.ly, shortulr.at, goo.gl from google, but it is discontinued now, and the most common one bitly.com. What these platforms do is, the shorten up the long URL to a much simpler form which redirects anyone who clicks on it to the original link.
Take for instance, any of my YouTube videos on the Phenomenal Concepts channel. In each description, I have a part that goes like, “If this is your first time here DON’T CLICK THIS:” followed by the bitly link, and if you should click on it, it redirects to the subscription page for you to subscribe to my channel. And with this, I can tell the number of clicks I got, the platforms where they were clicked on and the location of the people who clicked on it. This is a clear good example when you want to know who you audience are. But these scam messages do it so you don’t know which particular site you’re visiting until you open it. Before you know it, your IP address is already recorded.



Now that all of these have sunk in, let’s talk about secured connections.
Noticed that each website you visit has an “http://” leading the “www.” before the web address? This is the HyperText Transfer Protocol and is fundamental element which allows your browser to access a website on the internet. And for a secured connection to the website, there has to be an “s” right after the “p”, hence “https://”. Websites like youtube, google, facebook, yahoo, Instagram, theyolarbi.com, will always have https in the link for a secured connection.
Well, if we revisit the screenshots I showed at the beginning of this video, you would notice that, neither, not even one of these websites used https.
And for the sake of this video, I sacrificed myself.
Here, I got an email which happened to be in the Spam Folder, strike 1. It included a PDF and some information about my order on hold on Amazon. And they are so clever to make you think the problem is with you card details. So, you visit the website and try to correct this by adding your actual card details. Once, they have this info, they can shop online at any time without any trace. I don’t have any orders on Amazon, so that’s strike 2.
But I still went ahead to click on verify now. Guess what, it redirected me to a website which had nothing to do with Amazon. I’m sure the website was taken down at some point but until then, the harm may have already been done.

With this 2nd one, I intentionally visited the ones sent over WhatsApp.
It’s the one regrading Melcom. Funny enough, all the messages here are not actual comments but a screenshot. So yeah, you can’t comment, just look at them. I decided to take their fake test, then afterwards I was presented with this. Free money.
Take a look at the rules to win. Hihi, of course, I didn’t share. But acted like I did. Each time you clicked on the share button your blue bar fills up, until you get to 100%. After that, more and more ads pop up. More and more questions and quizzes. Then eventually, your gift. Yaaayi, an iPhone. But wait, I thought I was winning GHc 500 instead. Call now to claim your prize. And this is the phone number you’re presented with. A United Kingdom number that never goes through when you call.

So yeah, basically they are running ads on these websites and are making money by tricking people to click and share with others.



So anytime you’re about to visit a website, check to see if it includes an “s” in the “http” that it begins with. The “s” stands for secure, before you even click on the link.
If you get a link to a website which happens to be a URL, try and visit the website itself by using the Web Address, the search for whatever information the link was talking about there. Don’t follow the link blindly.
And anytime someone contacts you on facebook or Instagram and says, click on the link to vote for them, check the link well.
And don’t ever add your bank card details when Instagram babes invite you for a, well that…
If you’re on your computer, you have the opportunity to preview the link before you click on it by looking at the bottom left of your screen when you hover of the link or button.
And finally, if the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.