I’ve written about this gambit before, but today I encountered an especially egregious example of one.
While perusing an article found at reddit, one of the pages I visited popped up with this:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
My phone started buzzing like crazy, the progress bar went all the way to the right, and i was told that I had a myriad of viruses. All I had to do was download “Psafe” to get my phone clean again.
As I tried to back out of this steaming pile of moose droppings, I was presented with the following sequence of screens, with concomitant “Urgent!” vibrations – in other words, there was no way out:
Click to view slideshow.If these popups are to be believed, my poor Android had become virus central, and I might as well just throw it away and buy a new one.
But by now you should know that this is all nonsense, designed to trick the unwary and the gullible into downloading Psafe, a supposed protection application from the Play Store. How a legitimate application, if that’s what it is, can resort to such scummy promotion techniques is beyond me – unless it’s the typical drivel put out by affiliate marketers. Be that as it may, tactics like this are enough to sour me on a piece of software forever – and tell others to stay away from it as well.
Another example.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I really work hard to keep the content of this blog family-friendly. This kind of stuff makes me want to send vulgar open letters to the people who do this, but I’ll have to content myself with putting it out there so other people might also be warned.
If you get junk like this on your Android, it’s not infected. Restart your phone you can’t get out of the loop, and if it’s really bad, reinstall your browser.
And never, ever, use Psafe for anything – a company that stoops to these methods of despicably dishonest advertising does not deserve your business.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
