Fake Steam phishing baits victims with free Discord Nitro
Victims end up on a fake page where their credentials are stolen
Hackers are running a new phishing campaign targeting Discord users with a message that offers a fake free month of Nitro.
Security researchers at Malwarebytes said victims who fall for the scam are taken to a spoofed website that looks like a legitimate Discord page where a fake pop-up appears asking for the user’s Steam credentials.
Researchers said the scam is active and circulating Discord. It is either propagated by bot accounts or scammer-controlled accounts.
The phishing campaign starts with a message sent to a user’s direct messages inbox telling the potential victim they can get one month of free Nitro. It claims that all the recipient has to do is just link their Steam account “and enjoy.”
The URL misspells “Nitro” as “Niltro.” If victims do not see the misspelling and click on the URL, it redirects them to a legitimate-looking Discord landing page with a “Get Nitro” button.
“Clicking the “Get Nitro” button opens something that deceptively resembles a Steam pop-up, when in fact, it’s actually not a separate window but a part of the website itself,” said researchers.
Researchers said the tactic is like one fraudsters used about two years ago, described here by Reddit user /Bangaladore. The Reddit user discovered the pop-up is not a pop-up.
“If you try to drag the window off of the parent chrome window, what happens? You can’t. It just stops at the edge. If you scroll up and down on the original page, the Steam sign in the [sic] window goes with it. A normal pop-up does not act like this,” the Reddit user said at the time.
When Discord users key in their Steam credentials in the fake pop-up, it will show them the error message saying, “The account name or password that you have entered is incorrect”. Behind the scenes, though, their Steam credentials have already been stored on the fraudulent website.
In this campaign, hackers used 195[dot]133[dot]16[dot]40 as an IP address. There were also over one hundred other scam domains found on the same IP address, including 1nitro.club, appnitro-discord.com, asstralissteam.org.ru, discord-steam-promo.com, among others.
“Stay safe out there! And please don’t just click links that come out of the blue,” warned researchers.
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