Tag: guessology.com

No, that YouTube survey with the free iPad is not real and you could be charged $9.99 for participating

A couple of nights ago during a late-night browsing session, I went over to youtube.com and was presented with this:

Before going forward, I should say it was a long day and I was really tired. I wasn’t thinking straight. Also, in my case, I’d swear that in the URL bar it said “youtube.com” and not what you see here.

Normally, such scammer tactics would not work on me and I’d close the window right away, but in this case it seemed legitimate (especially since the URL did say “youtube.com”). I pressed on. What’s the worst that could happen? After answering three simple questions, you are presented with this screen:

Here, greed just kicked in. I saw that they were all out of Macbook Airs and had only a few iPhones and iPads left, so I had to act fast! Somebody could be scooping up the last iPhones or iPads that YouTube was offering! Quick, let’s go with the iPad! I clicked on the iPad button and got this:

Now I must’ve been really tired because I should’ve immediately caught on that this was a scam if it required me to enter my phone number and email address. I mean, why couldn’t YouTube just use my YouTube account for this? Or maybe let me login with my gmail account? Foolishly, I entered my phone number and email address. It brought me to a page asking me for the PIN that they were about to text me on my phone. Ooh boy, here comes my free iPad!

A few seconds later, I got a text from some service called guessology.com with my PIN.

Without even thinking that this was a scam (again, I was really tired and fueled by greed), I entered the PIN. Immediately after entering my PIN, I got another text from the guessology.com “service”:

At this point I realized this must’ve been a scam since I read the text a little closer and realized there was a $9.99 per month fee. Man, did I feel like an idiot then. I just gave my email address and phone number to some scammer. I immediately texted STOP to the service and it gave me a message saying I had just unsubscribed. Good. No harm done. Hopefully.

I did some googling and found out that YES, they can and do charge you the $9.99 “service fee” even if you didn’t really consent to it. Basically, by entering the pin on the “survey” website, you are consenting to joining this fake service that just texts you bullshit. If you get as far as I did, be sure to text STOP so that they stop sending you these texts. Hopefully, at worst they will charge you $10 and you can then go to your mobile provider and try to get them to take the charges off.

I cannot believe this is legal. For at least $10 a pop, these guys must be making lots of money fooling people into entering their email address and phone number.

I did some more research and here’s some useful info on this scam:

I don’t recall what site I entered to get to this fake survey, but after some sleuthing, I found that these URLs work:

(THESE ARE FAKE)
http://youtub.com
http://youtubbe.com
http://youtubb.com
http://youtobe.com

In my case, I’d swear I went to the regular youtube.com. I have it in my history, so all I have to do is type “yout” then hit tab to complete it. I don’t know why I ended up on a fake site instead. Perhaps there was a malicious ad or something on the page that redirected me? I’ll never know for sure.