“Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer” banner is just one more version of an online scam, which became widespread over the last quarter. Crooks try to steal some of your sensitive data through the fake survey. The biggest problem is that this banner is usually displayed by a virus. In this post, I will show you the detailed information about the “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer”. As a bonus, you will have the virus removal guide that will help you to get rid of that pop-up message.
What is “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer” pop-up?
A lot of users report to us about that pop-up notification, that appears unpredictably in browsers. On that page, users can see Amazon Consumer Inquiry logo, and a claim that your IP-address is chosen to receive a free prize. The site offers to get this prize after a short survey. Intrigue is increased by the timer and the sign “The prizes amount is limited for today!”. As banners say, all you have to do is to answer several easy questions. The prizes, however, are pretty expensive. Crooks promise iPhone 11, Samsung Galaxy Tab or a Kindle Paperwhite.
The survey this fraudulent website offers you to answer is a collection of stupid questions. Nonetheless, among these strange questions, you will also see the form where you are asked to type your shipping address, name, phone number and email address. As the site states, this information is needed to deliver you the prize. Of course, all these claims are lies. You will neither have a gift card nor a smartphone, but you have already shared your personal information. And that’s enough for crooks to make profit on you.
Sometimes, after finishing the “survey”, you will see the transfer to another page. That may be another pseudo-giveaway, as well as fraudulent and phishing pages. Perfect example of the fraudulent pages you can be redirected to is FastSupport scam. Both of those dubious pages will try to force you to install unwanted programs under the guise of legit software.
How dangerous is the “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer” scam?
As I said earlier, “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer” scam steals the personal data you typed in the form. This loss is already a thing to worry about, because fraudsters can manage this information freely. The data you typed in the form will be sold in future through different channels. Only fraudsters can know who is the buyer for that huge base of contacts. They can sell it to online retailers, spammers, who will receive the payment for each spam email, or, possibly, other fraudsters, who can commit scam campaigns like Upgrade your account. None of the mentioned results are positive.
In case of redirection to other dubious websites, the consequences may be much worse. Unwanted programs are spread massively through such sites. The majority of them can correctly be classified as scareware or adware. Such as SAproduct or different browser add-ons “for internet safety” are typical examples of these sorts of programs. Some of your programs can just stop working, since the mentioned “supreme anti-malware tool” marked it as malicious and blocked. The only way to remove that “threat” and get your app back is to buy a license for this “antivirus”. As you can see, the main sense of scareware installation is money extortion.
Why do I see the “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer” scam pop-up?
Usually, “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer” pop-up does not appear autonomously. You cannot open that page manually, because your browser just blocks the connection to possibly malevolent sites. There are two ways of seeing it. First case is when you are redirected to the “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer” scam page from another website. Such a situation means that the maintainers of that site have a contract with fraudsters. At least this fact is a reason to stop using such a page.
Another reason for this scam appearance is a virus activity. Adware is able to modify the browser configurations and networking settings. After these changes your web browser will show you such frauds as “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer” popup or PayApp rewards automatically and regularly, without any of your actions. The presence of that virus may easily be tracked. If you see that a lot of banners appeared on sites last time, and even with the AdBlock plugin, you are definitely infected. But don’t panic – there is nothing to fear. This sort of virus does not deal a lot of damage if removed in time, especially if you perform the removal with GridinSoft Anti-Malware.
The sign of adware presence
About the danger of adware
Adware is not very dangerous itself. It only makes changes to your web browser configurations to show you the ads. To make the ads demonstration more intrusive, some of the adware variants also add the separate task to Task Scheduler. That action allows the virus to open the browser window periodically, for example, every 30 minutes. That’s nothing strange in such a behavior, since adware brings money to its creators only with ads demonstrating. However, there is nothing pleasant for the victim.
The danger of adware is right inside of the ads it shows to you. Fraudsters who handle the banners that the virus shows to its victims do not care about the victims safety. Taking a contract for ads displaying from other malware distributors is a usual thing for them. But lasts can spread not adware, but trojan-miners, scareware, spyware, and so on. These viruses carry much more danger than adware, causing identity loss and even hardware failures. The less time is gone after adware injection – the less is the chance to see the malicious ad and click it unintentionally.
How to remove adware and forget about the “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer” scam?
Adware deals low damage to the victim’s PC, however, it makes a lot of changes in different places. In total you will definitely have problems catching all these changes. And reverting them to original may carry significant danger for your system, especially if we are talking about registry editing. But such things as browser settings can easily be reset manually. You will see the guide for it below.
Initially, we must wipe out the virus. It is important to do it first of all, because adware will break back everything you fix. For this purpose, I recommend you to use GridinSoft Anti-Malware. That antivirus tool is a well-proven and effective program, which will surely wipe the adware from your PC. Its databases are updated every day, so even the newest types of virus shall not pass1.
Remove the viruses with GridinSoft Anti-Malware
- Download GridinSoft Anti-Malware by pressing the button above. Install it to proceed the malware removal. Right after the installation program will offer you to start the Standard scan.
- Standard scan takes 3-6 minutes. It checks the disk where the system keeps its files. The majority of viruses place their files on that disk.
- After the scan is over, you can choose the action for each detected malicious item. For all dangerous viruses the default action is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to remove the viruses from your computer.
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