Pinterest users can “pin” content from other external web pages onto the virtual corkboards and then share their boards with others.
Scammers are posting images and links to “free offers” onto Pinterest boards. If Pinterest users click on one of these links, they are taken to an external website that requests users to “re-pin” the offer onto their own Pinterest boards. This enables the scammers to propagate the scam throughout the site, explained Symantec researcher Nishant Doshi.
Then, the users are asked to click a second link, which redirects them to a survey scam page. Most scam pages ask users to fill in a survey, sign up for subscription services, reveal personal information, or install executables.
“Some of the Pinterest scams we analyzed led to a cost-per-action (CPA) based network. For each successful conversion the scammer is expected to make between one and 64 US dollars. We speculate that a scammer might be earning a few hundred dollars each day from these scams”, Doshi explained.
The Pinterest scams are similar to existing ones targeting social network sites. "In light of these scams on popular social networking websites, we encourage users to avoid offers that appear too good to be true and not re-pin such content. We also encourage them to review their Pinterest boards and remove pins related to such scam surveys”, Doshi concluded.