TheOnlineBusiness.com and the CNBC Forgery

My Twitter feed was hit with the same identical tweet, over and over again tonight, which read: This isn’t a scam, act now! CNBC.COM-exclusive.org. Is this really from CNBC, and is it legit?

The Domain
This is absolutely NOT from CNBC. The website is com-exclusive.com. They merely put a subdomain of CNBC in front of it to make it look like it’s from “cnbc.com.” That this site is not by CNBC.com. A simple whois lookup of com-exclusive.com shows that it is registered to a person in New Zealand.

The Tweet
The sheer number of accounts tweeting this exact same message is massive, which leads me to believe that these are a result of hacked accounts, perhaps due to people clicking on phishing messages, such as “Someone is posting rumors about you…“. They could also be fake accounts, but it doesn’t seem like this is the case for all of the accounts I looked at.

The Website: Fakery Abounds
The website itself is a fake article about a person in my area who earns nearly $7000 per month at home, part time. Sounds realistic, right? This type of tactic – identifying your city by your IP address, and then tailoring the website to tell a story of someone in your area – has been around for years, used heavily in the fake blogs of the acai explosion in 2009.

So the “person” discussed on the website is clearly fake.

The banner at the top of the website clearly shows the CNBC logo, which clearly isn’t involved in this website, so that is fake as well. There isn’t even a small disclaimer stating that they aren’t affiliated with CNBC and that the story isn’t real. They just brazenly pretend to be CNBC.

Virtually every link you click on the page takes you to the same place: theonlinebusiness.com. Even the fake articles along the side, such as one that looked like a story on a Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

The initial website is simply a CNBC forgery with a phony story that is meant to drive traffic to theonlinebusiness.com.

Would you really do business with someone who has lied and presented itself as something else? And let’s not forget those spam tweets that began this whole process, that promised this isn’t a scam.

Whenever someone goes out of their way to say they aren’t a con, they usually are. Theonlinebusiness.com should be blacklisted due to forgery and blatant lies.

This is a complete scam.

This is a fake CNBC website.

10/5/2012 Update
This scam continues, but with varying domains. Today we spotted http://cnbc.com-indexxq.info being tweeted out, with the tweet insisting that it isn’t a scam. Be on the lookout for fake CNBC websites and tweets!