Beware of phishing ads—please don’t get sucked in
A blog reader has let me know that—at least in Australia—phishing ads are appearing at the bottom of my entries. Gosh, this annoys the crap out of me—not that he told me, but that the ads are happening.
I have no control over the ads here. The site is free for me to use and I don’t earn any money from it. That said, I recently paid $20 to get more space because I was running out of free room.
Phishing ads try to trick you into clicking on something (they often promote free giveaways).
They masquerade as a trustworthy or a temptingly provocative site, but they really want to grab information about you, such as your usernames, passwords and credit card details.
So my plea is don’t get sucked in. Don’t click through to promises that are too-good-to-be-true. Trust me, no grocery stores are giving away vouchers for $400 worth of goods.
Here’s a link relating to the ad my informing reader has been seeing. The story has other links with more detail about phishing.
I have to confess that I can’t see these ads. In South America, the ads are in Spanish, so I’m not sure exactly what they say. The one I see most often has a pic of a horoscope, which makes me wonder?
As an aside, I tried to purchase an ad-free version of this blog, but it says it is not an option available to me. No idea why, but I have written to WordPress to tell them about the phishing and ask why I can’t get an ad-free option. Stay tuned for updates.
Where to next? 
There are ads at the bottom of some of your posts however I figure they are meant to pay for the site, nothing comes free of course. As in anything on the internet, never ever click on something you don’t know the source of and 100% trust! It’s a dog eat dog world out there on the internet and we’re all wearing Milk Bone underwear!
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Thanks Dave for such good advice — don’t click on anything you don’t 100 per cent trust.
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Hi,
Here in the northeastern USA and I guess throughout the USA (on the Internet)… I do not see any ads/phising on any of your Blog screens which I go to…. and I am using FireFox browser. However, at the very bottom are URLs to Paperpunch by The Theme Foundry and Blog at WorldPress dot com .
Sy
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Thanks Sy. Relieved to know you aren’t seeing the ads. The urls you see at the bottom are always there.
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