Scammers Use Harvard Education Platform to Promote Pirated Movies (torrentfreak.com)

TorrentFreak reports: Spammers are using Harvard's educational sharing tool H2O to promote pirated movies. Thousands of links to scammy sites have appeared on the site in recent weeks. Copyright holders are not happy with this unintended use and are targeting the pages with various takedown notices. H2O is a tool that allows professors and students to share learning material in a more affordable way. It is a welcome system that's actively used by many renowned scholars. However, in recent weeks the platform was also discovered by scammers. As a result, it quickly filled up with many links to pirated content. Instead of course instructions and other educational material, the H2O playlists of these scammers advertise pirated movies. The scammers in question are operating from various user accounts and operate much like traditional spam bots, offering pages with movie links and related keywords such as putlocker, megashare, viooz, torrent and YIFY.

Comments

"scammers" or "spammers" ?

[sittingnut]

title -
"Scammers Use Harvard ..."
summary -
"Spammers are using Harvard's ..."

Re: Pirated Movies

[ArmoredDragon]

I'm curious how somebody is scamming you by offering you links to pirated movies. I mean what, do these movies come in a .exe file or something? If so then call it malware.

Re:is this really a "scam"?

[ShaunC]

It's both spam and scam, really. These people are spamming on behalf of shady supposed "streaming" sites hosted in Russia and various eastern bloc nations. Whether or not those sites will actually show you the movie you're trying to see is unknown but they'll absolutely infect you with adware, malware, and other garbage.

This shit plagued Reddit for months, they finally got on top of it and it looks like the scam spammers have moved elsewhere.

How do they access?

[manu0601]

TFA says access requires an .edu address. How did spammers get in? Did they hijack student's accounts?

This is great news

[rsilvergun]

The Pirate Movie. Treasure Island. Cutthroat Island. Captain Blood. At least these classics will get the audience they deserve. For too long Pirate movies have fallen under the radar (not the least because Pirates don't have radar). Bringing these movies to a wide audience... hang on... oh waited. Pirate_d_ movies. Well then. Carry on.

Scamming the host

[SeattleLawGuy]

I'm curious how somebody is scamming you by offering you links to pirated movies. I mean what, do these movies come in a .exe file or something? If so then call it malware.

They are not scamming you; they (and you) are scamming the non-consenting host by using it for something other than the educational material you are allowed to use it for. It's like if you call an Uber and then send your pet goat in the car without you while the driver is looking the other way.

Re:Scamming the host

[DRJlaw]

They are not scamming you; they (and you) are scamming the non-consenting host by using it for something other than the educational material you are allowed to use it for.

Or they're scamming you...

"While most students won't mind free access to the latest blockbusters, the links provided are not leading to regular pirate sites and services.

Instead they point to scammy portals, many of which require a credit card to signup, which undoubtedly leads to disappointment. These kinds of scams are nothing new, but seeing them listed on a Harvard website is a new development.

With links from the official Harvard domain name, the pages are an SEO goldmine and do very well in Google's search results."

RTFA.

Re:Scamming the host

[retchdog]

No, that's more of a "tragedy of the commons" situation as well as a plain old ToS violation.

The putative scamming comes in the multiple layers of portals and redirects before the user finds the content. There will be several ads which are going to be even less effective than usual ads. These are placed by a robust marketplace of simulating so-called "organic" ad views, and are often used to bulk up claimed impression numbers. You could argue that it's a matter of the advertisers getting what they paid for, but since there is little in the way of self-regulation and the impressions are sold as genuine (rather than spammed through pop-ups and nested redirects), it's arguably fair to call it a scam. Marginally, the profit is pathetic, but it scales well.

Some of the portals will also try to trick users with the usual "install this totally legitimate virus scanner!" crap. Probably no one on slashdot will fall for this, but it's still a scam albeit an obvious one. There might be more devious javascript running also, but i'm not sure about that.

Re:is this really a "scam"?

[Haoie]

Facebook was rife with these on all the big pages up until recently. It's better lately, probably filters finally cleaning them up.

Re:One would expect

[Coren22]

It tells you nothing. GWBush wasn't a dumb man, he acted like a country boy to get voted in, and it worked.