ESET  said that the URL that comes with the message was not an official WhatsApp domain but that was not stopping people clicking on the link. They are taken to a page that invites you to answer a series of questions in the form of a survey – ranging from how you found the offer to your opinion on the app.

While you would be responding to the questionnaire, the site would invite you to pass along the offer to at least 30 more people in order to qualify for the big ‘reward’. This provides the scammers with more information to spread the fraud.

ESET  said that the goal here is click fraud – a highly prevalent monetisation scheme that relies on racking up bogus ad clicks that ultimately bring revenues for the operators of any given campaign.

Even though in this case ESET found no evidence that clicking the link led to the installation of malicious software or that there was any intention to phish for personal information, it doesn’t mean that this cannot change at any time.

Meanwhile, the same domain that hosts this scam is also home to many other ‘offers’, each pretending to come from a different company, including Adidas, Nestlé and Rolex, to name but a few. The number of Google-indexed sites showed how the cybercriminals behind these campaigns multiply the fraudulent offers that they are launching into cyberspace.

ESET said that the fraud is a riff on the same motif that which appeared in 2017, when a similar WhatsApp-themed scam made the rounds. It also promised to unlock free internet access, but in reality you would end up on sites that signed you up for premium and costly SMS services or installed third-party apps on your smartphone. And in 2018, meanwhile, perhaps the same fraudsters threw out ‘free Adidas shoes’ as the bait.