New Scams and Phishing Methods Spreading through Crowd-Sourcing Sites

Hiding behind the anonymity of task requesting accounts, scammers can pose there work as data entry, software testing or marketing efforts. Unfortunately, these new scams and phishing methods are spreading through crowd-sourcing sites.

* Social networking sites gain power through membership numbers. Crowd-sourcing has become a new way of gaining potential members. Payment of a few cents to get new sign-ups generates new accounts and possibly long term members. In this case, their payment is a marketing expense. Unfortunately, paying others to create dummy accounts is also used by those whose accounts are blocked to gain access to these sites, with the crowd-sourced worker paid to hand over the credentials to the account they created.
* Click fraud is easily outsourced via crowd-sourcing. Crowd-sourcing tasks in this category request that someone simply click on a website and then click on a specific advertisement. More elaborate schemes request that the person copy and paste text of the ad to post in the comments or verification field. This takes up precious time that can be used to use up the time limit of a task, eliminating the need to pay someone for the click fraud.
* Why raid someone's PayPal account with fraudulent charges? New hacking attempts could simply log into blog sites and content creation websites and change the "payment" address for PayPal from the individual's PayPal account to that of the scammer. This fraud can be perpetrated via crowd-sourcing websites by asking someone to log in to PayPal to transfer money, enter their PayPal address to receive payment or give the locations of sites where they have Google Adsense set up.
* Plagiarism has become part of the crowd-sourcing landscape. Why employ article spinning software when articles can be rewritten by humans for 25 cents to $2? A new form of this scam has been to post tasks requesting rewrites of solicitation emails for signing up at websites or informing someone that they need to log into their account. Rewritten messages in the person's native language reduce the red flags that poorly translated phishing messages cause while varying verbiage trips up message.
* Lend me a $1, the crowd-sourcing task states, and I'll pay you $2. Or it may be a request to test a new payment website, requiring a small payment of funds in return for a greater amount. The task is most likely fraudulent, taking your money and then paying a small token amount or setting the time limit so short that the task times out without payment while the person has sent money to the scammer.
* Requests to create a new "task requestor" account on a crowd-sourcing website should raise a red alert. Someone with an active "task requestor" account who is requesting a new one is making this request in the expectation that their current account will be shut down. If someone is unable to create a new task requestor account on a different crowd-sourcing website, this means that they have been blocked due to reports of non-payment, solicitation or fraud. Never perform work for someone who has been blocked or likely will be blocked from requesting work is done.