CleverTap: a Work From Home scam
Mark Honeychurch - 9 October 2023
While shopping in KMart a few weeks ago, on Saturday afternoon, I received an unsolicited text message. This isn’t unusual, as I take the bold move when it comes to privacy of not trying to hide my contact details at all. I’m a believer in the philosophy of almost inviting spam, and then dealing with it as it arrives by setting up spam filters and mailbox rules. A benefit of doing this, for me as a skeptic, is that I get to see all the weird and wonderful nonsense that spammers attempt to bombard people with. And so it was with this text message:
Hello dear, I am Sundm from LinkedIn, and our recommend a part-time job for you, with an hourly salary of $70~$280! For internal testing for some companies’ mobile apps. It’s easy to work, you can work for 1-2 hours each time, you can get work permits at least 6 times a week, it’s up to you to decide. To apply, please reply “Yes” or “Interested”.If you are not interested, please ignore this iMessage or reply “Stop” and you will not receive such push messages
Yes
If you want to join this part-time job, please tell me your age. (You must be over 22 years old)
37
Okay, what is your WhatsApp number? I will now forward your WhatsApp number to our person in charge, who will explain more about work and salary to you.
Umm, it’s the number you’re texting!
Thank you for your cooperation. Our company manager will contact you via WhatsApp as soon as possible. Due to the recent busyness of the HR department, our may contact you today or tomorrow. Please wait patiently. have a nice day
Marvellous! I already have a job, but a second income wouldn’t hurt. And yes, I lied about my age - but only by 10 years. It wasn’t long before I received a WhatsApp message from “Anna Lim”:
Hello! I’m Anna! I got your phone number from Sundm. I heard you’re interested in a job opportunity I’m working on, do you have time now to find out?
Not right now, as I’m out shopping. How about in an hour?
OK，
Please let me know when you get back.
Will do
In this article, my text is aligned to the right, and the scammer’s text is aligned to the left.
Wow, that was quick - I hadn’t even managed to make it home and Anna had already messaged me. As a middle-aged man, I’ve accepted that my weekend evenings aren’t quite as dynamic as they used to be. Rather than getting drunk and heading out clubbing, I tend to settle down these days of an evening to create software, write articles or bait scammers. So, this particular Saturday evening, I jumped on my laptop in the lounge, put on a movie in the background, and messaged my scammer:
I’m back home now.
OK,I will now send you the job description. You can take a look first.
Thanks
Our main job is to upload data for their APP platform from CleverTap. The nature of this job is freelance (non-technical, d for this job. No experience required) and the only requirement for you to do this job is to have a device with internet access.
As for the time and place of work, it is up to you to work on your own time with your own goals, which means you can work remotely without any restrictions.
The company’s hours of operation are 12:00 am to 23:59 pm. We can do this any time in between. It only takes about 1-2 hours at most
Would you accept the nature of this work and the hours of work? If so, I will continue to give you more details about the job.
Yep
This is an app marketing company CleverTap), and our role in this work is that of a data provider. App developers publish their apps on the CleverTap workbench, and all we need to do is help app developers optimize their apps to get data and traffic for them
Basically we help the applications that work with the company to optimize their applications. Simply put, we are acting as users to upload data and traffic on the workbench provided by the company. Therefore, we need to register as a user to get started and there are training sessions to learn its details.
But before I do, let me explain the remuneration package for you. Our salary is based on a basic salary + commission and we get paid every day.
What do you think?
Sounds good to me.
Our total income is based on a basic salary and commission. However, it is not a fixed rate. As it depends on the more you do, the more you earn. The commissions is our main income, the basic is depending on if you can upload data everyday, if yes you would earn basic. Eg, upload data 5 days in a row, will get extra $800 other than commissions.
Complete 2set tasks every day for 5 consecutive days to get 800USDT salary
Complete 2set tasks every day for 15 consecutive days to get 1500USDT salary
Complete 2set tasks every day for 30 consecutive days to get 3800USDT salary
So a month’s salary is 6100usdt, which is a fixed salary
Our daily job post will complete 2-3 packs of tasks per day, each pack of tasks has 40 tasks. We need to complete at least 2 packs in one day to count as a day’s work.
If you have any questions about pay, please let me know. If not, I will start training.
After this I pointed out that a contract like this, where you don’t get paid if you work but don’t meet a target, may be illegal, to which I was told “This is an international promotion company, I have been working for it for nearly a year, you can check the company’s business certificate on the workbench, all users will sign the user agreement when registering an account, which is legally effective”. Okay, that’s not very reassuring, but I’m not actually serious about this as a job because I know it’s going to end up being a scam, so it’s not a problem for me.
I was next told “I can start by taking you through the process with a training account. Then you can learn more about the company, how we upload data and how we make money from it. So you can get a better understanding of it”, and asked if I could spare an hour for training. Of course I could, I’d cleared my entire evening so that I could do this.
Apparently I was going to be working with a product called CleverTap. Now CleverTap is a real company involved in mobile marketing, and their dashboard is at dashboard.clevertap.com. But I was asked to visit a site called clevertap-very.com, which was obviously the scammers’ fake copy of the CleverTap website.
I followed the instructions I was given, and tried to register an account:
The app was so bad that it didn’t even work properly with my chosen username - markhoneychurch75. The error message told me “The user name is 3-100 characters long!”, which I think was probably supposed to be “The username needs to be 3-10 characters long”, but I feigned ignorance and spent a good half an hour with my scammer trying to sort out this problem - eventually she created an account for me and gave me my password. Obviously this would not be a secure thing to do with a proper website, but for this scam website I wasn’t going to worry too much. It was also a little suspicious that the username she chose for me was “Mark”. The idea that a major company like CleverTap would not have the username “Mark” taken already was laughable, but I guess compared to all the other red flags, this one was pretty minor.
Username Mark
Password 123456
Mark? Surely that’s been taken already?
I can’t be the first.
Is the username really just Mark?
It’s a really popular, boring name,
Surely that username belongs to someone else.
Are you really telling me I’m the first person called mark to register?
Yes
Okay, I’ll try it.
Hopefully I’m not going to be accessing someone else’s account.
NO
As always, I try to take up as much of a scammer’s time as possible - the more time they’re wasting with me, the less time they’re scamming other people. And, who knows, maybe if enough people like me waste their time and frustrate a scammer’s time, they might think twice about their career choice.
Once I was logged in, we started on the training, which involved me logging out and logging back in as my scammer’s account - “anna5216”. I was asked to prove that I was in the account by sending a screenshot of their balance, which was 1,615 USDT. I think in this instance USDT meant the Tether cryptocurrency, where one Tether coin is meant to be tethered to one US dollar. Here’s the screenshot I sent:
Before we started training, I was given some instructions of what I was meant to be doing, along with a warning that turned out to be a foreshadowing of future events:
Let’s start the training course, we need to complete 40 tasks, see the number 0/40 until 40/40 to complete this training course, now go start the optimization.
Keep clicking like this to complete 40/40 missions
If you encounter any problems when optimizing tasks please tell me, this platform has two kinds of tasks, one is the ordinary task, the second is the combination of tasks, the ordinary task commission is 0.5 times, the combination of tasks is 1.5 times
So, the job was pretty easy. Once logged in, I had to click the “Starting” button, and then 40 times I needed to repeat clicking the button “START GRABBING ORDERS” followed by clicking a button in the new window that popped up that said “Submit”. The window that opened each time showed a popular Android app, and from what I can tell the conceit was that I was somehow testing the app just by clicking the Submit button after being shown an image of the app’s icon. So, being a well-behaved and diligent employee, I got to work. Here are some of the apps I supposedly tested:
Now, as a programmer, I’m well aware of what software testing is, and I can assure that this is not it. Testing software is usually done at various levels, from unit testing (where individual functions are checked to make sure they give the outputs expected) all the way up to system testing (where the entire application is tested). These days, a lot of testing is automated, where testing software is used to test your software. But none of this requires a bunch of users blindly clicking a Submit button for your app. Anyway, I continued clicking the buttons, like a trained monkey, until…
Remember that warning I was given about a “combination of tasks” being a potential problem. Well, it didn’t take long before this rare event suspiciously occurred:
Hmmm, it says I have insufficient balance.
Which is weird - your balance ended up going down, even though I was making money.
Any idea what’s going on?
Screenshot for me. let me know what’s going on,
Can you believe it, I hit the jackpot on my very first try:
You have great beginner luck, thank you, you got the combo pack, yes!
We will get to earn higher commissions! The combination package commissions is 1.5%
Let me explain the workbench system to you
Please do!
There are 2 types of tasks on this platform.
- Normal task
- Combination package
We cannot choose which tasks we wish to complete. All combination tasks are randomly assigned by the system，The commission for a normal task is 0.5%, the commission for combination task is triple which is 1.5%
This is the task from combination package, which is like a package that is made up of 1-3 normal tasks that are given by the system randomly.
When we get a normal order, our funds are refunded to us immediately, allowing us to roll over to the next task, but a combo task is a package made up of normal tasks that we must complete to get a refund and move on to the next task.
Which is why my training account is in negative now because my funds are in the previous task of the package.
Do you now understand this explanation of mine?
No
Not at all.
That was really confusing.
Why, if I’m working, would I go into negative balance.
When I work, I should be making money, not losing it.
So, I’ve just been told that, because I’ve hit a “combination” task, my account has sadly run into the red. And I have a sneaking suspicion that fixing this problem is going to involve me transferring money to the scammers, “temporarily” of course.
In the second half of my article, next week, you can find out how the scammers work hard towards trying to convince me to part with my money, see me having a little fun with the scammers’ “Customer Care” department, and read about how I try to turn the tables and scam the scammers!