Do Not Visit ScamSearch.com!
It's downright treacherous in cyberspace for the average consumer trying to avoid getting scammed—especially given the enormous number of sites masquerading as legitimate, but actually designed to steer you wrong. We run into these sites all the time, be they fake government grant review sites, or bogus acai berry review sites.
But while these sites are relatively harmless (provided you don't fall for their transparent BS and actually agree to buy anything from them), we just encountered a far more malicious variant that infected our machines with several types of malware.
The site is called ScamSearch.com, and whatever you do, DO NOT VISIT THIS SITE! We made the mistake of trying to check it out yesterday and the malware-spewing site took control of our PCs, which went into immediate meltdown.
The site pops up as the top result when you Google "scam + site," certainly looked promising, claiming to "Instantly search multiple consumer sites like ripoffreport, complaintsboard, scam.com and many more!"
Although we were able to grab an image of the site via Google cache, that's as close as we ever want to get to ScamSearch.com again. At first, we thought it might be a legitimate site that had been hijacked, but when a WHOIS search revealed a blind-registered domain (a classic tactic by scammers wishing to hide their identity), we thought otherwise.
As one of our machines was melting down, we noticed the following url (to which the badware was trying to redirect our PC) in the status bar: hugetopnano.cn. And a quick search revealed its presence on Malware Domain List. The domain is registered to one Raymond Best (location unknown), raymond@cybernauttech.com. According to the banner at the top of the Malware Domain List: "WARNING: All domains on this website should be considered dangerous."
Look for a follow-up post for details on the malware we got hit with. And once again, stay away from Scam Search.com!