Eight In Ten Olympic Websites Are Scams

The vast majority of websites related to the Olympics are scams, according to research from cloud security firm Zscaler.

Looking over all identified domains containing the term ‘Olympics’ that had been accessed by its customers, Zscaler found 80 percent of them are either scams or spam.

Many are home to typo squatters, who take advantage of mistakes web users make when entering addresses directly into address bars. “They are covered with advertising in the hope that users will click on one of those links since there is no useful content on the page,” the company explained in a blog post.

“Domain names cost only about $10 and hosting can be free, so this can be an effective way to make some money with a minimal initial investment.”

TV terrors

In the US, many scammers have tried to take advantage of the dissatisfaction amongst viewers over NBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Games. Many scams claim to offer uninterrupted streaming of the Olympics – something that would attract those irked by NBC’s numerous advert breaks during its coverage.

Zscaler spotted sites such as londonolympic2012tv.com and watchsummerolympics.com, created to dupe careless users.

Other sites, including olympicsgames.com and olympiczone.com, have simply attempted to get high up in search engine results so that when users click through they are presented with a plethora of ads. If they click on those ads, the scammers get paid, thanks to the way Google AdSense works.

TechWeekEurope recently found a number of convincing scams focusing on the Olympics, handing out our own kind of medals to the most devious.

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