I’m no longer bothered with the numerous fake “Download / Free / Click here” buttons that surround the real download button. These are old-school die-hard mousetrapping scheme, which leads you to either of:
- Other “Download / Free / Click here” buttons (least bad)
- Various types of scammer sites, such as phishing, fake tech support, fake shopping site, investment fraud (enough bad)
- Immediate malware installer (worst)
There are millions of them on the internet, they are part of our ecosystem. There is nothing we can do about the situation, just get used to them. Once acknowledging their existence, you can easily unsee them.
But this guy, “Tech Blazing” is different, he crossed the line. There is no real link anywhere in the page, because it’s built only for luring unsuspecting victims. He blatantly says “How to Securely Download and Install the Software” in the looong shite article (Whole screenshot), but the real answer is “Don’t click anything here, just go check the official website, period”.
Btw, there is one more detail to add to the “least bad”-“worst” scenario above, it wasn’t just a single bomb, you dived into a minefield, unfortunately.
There is a pattern you might have already known, of how one click brings more of the same kind of ads online. So follows the pattern they malvertisers. They follow the cookies your browser has been fed, hoping you hit the bigger lures.
When your mission is to bring Paint.NET home and is hampered by Tech Blazing’s nasty traps, you may somehow return to Google Search, the only safe place for you to retrace Paint.NET’s remnants after escaping the TB trap zone. Thanks to Google’s powerful search engine, getting to the right place is not the hardest part.
However, instead of getting reunited with your lost puppy, you are likely to be caught again by the final set of “click here” traps lying in wait right next to your whimpering dog. Or, you’ll end up pressing the backspace key as soon as your eyes are overwhelmed by the deadly minefield and your ears don’t catch your pup’s cry for help over the noise. Either way, they are so persistent that it’s impossible for those who can’t “unsee” these malvertisers to download and install the free version of Paint.NET, which also has the paid version on Microsoft Store.
You can stop seeing them by clearing browser cache and cookies, but the real problem is that you might not even realize you are being stalked.
#TechBlazing #malvertising #PaintNetDownload #ScamWebsite