Healthbuddy SMS scam / Subscription trap

Recently there as been an influx of SMS-messages informing that "your parcel has arrived". The message will contain a short URL bouncing you around the net couple times and landing you to a scam-site. Finnish CERT-FI actually released a warning about the scammers operation recently. You can read the announcement in Finnish here.

Scam

The fradaulent website did look like this:

I was in process of writing this blog post and POOOOOOOF! The domain went away.

Ultimately you will land on a form to enter your information into a subscription trap:

If there would be a honest scammer, these guys are. The fine print on the right hand corner explains how the scam will work. You won't be receiving your non-existent shipment, but you will be paying initial fee of a subscription. Nice!

As usual, I did some digging about the announced website and the company. The website is still running on a Hezner VM in Germany. Since these "honest" scammers are protecting your precious GDPR-covered PII, their website even has a valid TLS-certificate issued by Comodo. The obvious motivation for using encryption is the fact that most browsers will fight back for an user entering credit card information without encrypted traffic. So, a very elaborate scam, this.

Company

Since these scammers are honest, they inform the service "responsible" company being NMS Services Ltd. I doubt that much, given the company given seems to be some sort of blank shell. A company without any activity:

There is a good chance, the above ltd. has nothing to do with this scam.

Huge footprint

The "m.o." or modus operandi of these types of scams is to have a huge footprint. They have bunch of domains and companies as it's guaranteed their entire operation will be shut down by law enforcement as they scam along.

To get their traffic to the right place, the SMS has a very short URL in it. Something with gramkl.com in it. That's a jump-site operating at Google bouncing users to lilorole.com, which is a Cloudflare forwarder. The first form result is forwarded to t.viprsp.nl, a Cloudflare forwarder, which will ultimately land at end result healthybuddy.eu, the real harvesting website at Hezner.

What we have there in the above chain, is numer of top-level-domains and bunch of companies operating under different jurisdictions. Shutting all of them down is very very very difficult. If one is shut down, they'll just pull another rabbit out of their hat and go on scamming.

Alternates

In the TLS-certificate information I found following:

Subject: OU = Domain Control Validated, OU = PositiveSSL, CN = bestplayerwins.com
X509v3 extensions:
  X509v3 Subject Alternative Name:
    DNS:bestplayerwins.com, DNS:www.bestplayerwins.com

An alternate scam site running @ bestplayerwins.com is found. Again, this scam is a honest one, it will inform that they're bullshitting your with a subscription trap.

Just by investigating the site more, there are (unsurprisingly) other domains found:

bpwbill.com and ccbill.info sites look exactly like the initial scam site:

Again they have distributed their operation to multiple domains and TLDs to make it extremely difficult to shut the entire operation down.

I did not check the details of Gibraltar-registered Future Base Ltd because of high cost of the records. Again, there is a very good chance they're not affiliated with this operation at all.

Finally

With the words of Sergeant Phil Esterhaus from Hill Street Blues: