Although it was the A.J. McCarron led University of Alabama football team that won the national championship on Monday night, it appears that the biggest winner of the night may have been McCarron’s girlfriend and Miss Alabama USA, Katherine Webb. With the game turning into a rout early, ESPN cameras looking for anything to hold viewers’ interest focused in on Katherine Webb while announcer Brent Musburger went on and on about her. The attention apparently had an effect. By the end of the night, she had increased her Twitter followers by 100,000 and all of the news media was talking about her. So where is the scam, you might ask? Scammers are fully aware of the increased interest in Katherine Webb and knowing that curious people including those looking for nude pictures, whether they exist or not, will be receptive to emails, text messages, social media postings and phony websites found through search engines to have such pictures or other information about Katherine Webb will be luring unsuspecting people in with tainted links and downloads that will not provide the information or pictures promised, but rather will download keystroke logging malware that will steal all of the information from the searcher’s computer and turn him or her into a victim of identity theft.
TIPS
Don’t click on any links or download pictures of other material from emails, text messages, social media postings because you cannot be sure that they are legitimate. Sometimes they may appear to come from friends of yours, however, it may be that your friend’s account has been hacked so that it appears that the message you receive is from your friend, but it is really from an identity thief. And even if it is your real friend passing on some photos or other information, you can’t be sure that your friend is not passing on infected material that he or she doesn’t even realize is infected. Also be wary of websites that turn up in Google or other search engine searches because they may just be phony websites set up by identity thieves. Just because you find the website on a search engine does not mean that it is legitimate. If you must get further information, stick to websites that you know are legitimate, such as www.tmz.com.
