After analyzing the content of collected websites, we found that Type 1 and Type 2 websites provide the identical content of Bitcoin investment suggested as by the alleged “Alan Tam”. The layout of the page was also identical, with special crafted blog-like style. The following screenshot shows the layout of the content.
Figure 1 Screenshot of maladvertising content layout
The style of the website appeared to be a blog post, with all hard-coded top banner, side news bar, article metadata and content. All hyperlinks in the website were directed to the same target link. This target link redirected multiple times through different domains and arrived at the landing page, Bitcoin Future. This is to be reviewed in the latter part of this report.
The first few paragraphs of the maladvertising content were discussing how “Alan Tam’s” new investment strategy has shocked experts, exalting his investment methodology. The content mentioned about how fast people can earn money, one that is supported by many pieces of evidence and interviews. The paragraphs mentioned the interview carried by ViuTV, one of the TV broadcasting company in Hong Kong and were being sponsored by HSBC, a worldwide bank; a story but not a fact.
All paragraphs contain linkage and were relayed to a cryptocurrency trading platform called Bitcoin Future. It started by mentioning the interview of “Alan Tam”, then went on claiming the platform has been used for investment by different billionaires. It also mentioned about a certain person named, 李國松 who bared similar name as the Chairman of the Bank Of East Asia, that he also used this investment platform and has earned money.
The interviewing paragraphs led to the procedure of how to register and trade on that investment platform. At the end of all these paragraphs, there is a comment section that is hardcoded with crafted messages and names.
By reviewing the source code of the static page, we found that the date of the hardcoded blog post was dynamically updated to the website access time with JavaScript. This proved that the page was high hardcoded to fool users about how recent the content is.
The overall wordings used in the website appeared to be very native in Cantonese, giving the readers with an impression that there were not translated by an automated translator but specially written by native Cantonese speaker.
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