Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Scammers Target Neopets Users

Posted by Soulskill on from the guess-wow-finally-dried-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes "If you have children that play on the popular virtual world game Neopets, you might want to warn them of a social engineering scam gleefully targeting 12-year-old kids. Neopets users looking for rare items are sent private messages from the scammers, who direct them to sites hosting keyloggers & trojans. They then use the infected PC as a means to get to data the parents might have stored there, be it credit card details, Paypal accounts or online banking. Seeing the screenshots of some of these people talking about putting these children into botnets is just unbelievable — if ever you wanted proof that people up to no good online will go to any lengths to get their hands on some money (or even just feel good about outsmarting a 12-year-old), here it is."

2 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I know it's silly, but... by RobotRunAmok · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    My kids have real pets, for which they very responsibly care.

    They also play Webkinz.

    What's your point? Or was that just a condescending breeder-hating snark?

  2. Re:I know it's silly, but... by CannonballHead · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Well, I don't have kids. Nor do my non-existent kids have neopets. ;)

    I'm not really all that against neopet-esque things. But there does seem to be a trend of having rather ignorant children. As in the old jokes, where it used to be funny, of kids thinking milk came from the milk man and wouldn't believe it could come out of a cow. I realize some of that is simply age, but it sure seems like a lot of kids are getting more and more used to using "technology" with no clue how it works or where it came from, etc. And falling prey to a lot of rhetoric that is easily seen through if you actually know something about, hmmm, nature and How Things Work. Life doesn't have an Autosave feature... and if I tell a kid that and he says "Oh, so it's like a peramdeath world?" I think his level of thinking is not quite the same as mine...

    I'm glad your kids have real pets and are responsible. I'm young and don't quite have kids yet, but when I do, I plan on having them be responsible and, shall we say, educated from some place other than wikipedia and World of Warcraft :)

    [/rambling]