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BEWARE! If you take the poll with the offer of winning an iPhone or tablet you will be charged £4.50. It is a bit of a scam as far as I'm concerned as when you go through the procedure you are asked to select which you would like, then enter your mobile number. Then you are asked to answer OK to 81002 to be in the draw. As soon as you do that you are charged £4.50 off your balance and you have to then text STOP to be removed from a weekly charge of £4.50. Needless to say I did that but I am now £4.50 out of pocket!
I have mailed ePhotozine as I am surprised they sanction this sort of ripoff!
Note from Moderator:
The problem appeared to be a browser add-on called 'Yontoo' installed on the user's computer. See problem explained and how to fix.
Which poll is this? Where did you find it?
With regard to anything on the web, or indeed elsewhere, If it looks too good to be true, it is!
Quote: With regard to anything on the web, or indeed elsewhere, If it looks too good to be true, it is!
Thats about as useful as a chocolate fire guard! If a poll about a site, supposidly put there by the site, on a reputable site like this then one would hope you could trust the site and it was genuine, especially as the poll was about ePhotozine!
Quote: Which poll is this? Where did you find it?
I have received an email from David Burleson on this subject and have passed him all the facts so hopefully you guys can find out where it's coming from.
Quote: With regard to anything on the web, or indeed elsewhere, If it looks too good to be true, it is!
Thats about as useful as a chocolate fire guard! If a poll about a site, supposidly put there by the site, on a reputable site like this then one would hope you could trust the site and it was genuine, especially as the poll was about ePhotozine!
You are being very naive. There is never anything resembling a free lunch anywhere, I don't care whether it is suffixed .epz or .gov.uk. We should all know better! Any offer or competition or freeby you see, at some point they will want your money. You have been caught this time. You are not the first, neither will you be the last. Treat EVERYTHING with suspicion.
When ePhotozine ask you to take a quick survey with the chance to win an iPhone 5, why would one be suspicious? I have been a member here for years, taken surveys before (in fact there is one running at the top of this page right now for free e2 membership) and never had this sort of thing happen before.
Yes I have been "had" for £4.50 by "trusting" one of my favourite websites!
Cheddar, I totally understand , recently I had to let the team know of something simuler that appeared on here, very clever worded to draw you in, I don't believe epz see all the adverts that appear on the feeds so rely on us to let them know.
As pointed out above it could be a cookie feed that is targeting your Ip. Anyway thanks for the warning, hopefully you may have stopped someone falling for it unlike the cheerful critical ones that know everything and think us mere mortals are stupid.
It's those like you who put embarrassment aside to let others know that are helping.
Thanks Michael I hope David is looking after you. Just to explain how the adverts work for anyone else who's concerned. We have a number of spaces allocated for advertising around the site. These are generally found to the top and to the right. The ePZ ad team, Tricia and Tracey, sell space to our advertisers and we vet everyone. Any spare slots are filled by our third party ad servers who monitor content. We also monitor their content and block anything we don't like. But spammy adverts can occasionally slip through the net. David will be able to advise if this has happened but it's very rare as there are tight controls over what is allowed.
Hi Everyone,
As Michael mentioned, I've been working with him to get to the bottom of this problem and we have concluded that it's not something actually on ePHOTOzine. Instead, we believe it's a virus, ad ware, spyware or a dodgy browser plugin. The screenshot below shows what is occurring for Michael.
Notice the orange text links. These are not put in by ePHOTOzine or any of our affiliates/ad networks. In fact, we never linked these words on our site. The offending software (whatever it may be) is scanning the webpages that Michael is browsing, picking out certain words and then linking them to other sites with popups when you move the mouse over them.
How to Fix:
In this case, it was easy to fix by going into Firefox's add-ons and removing the Yontoo add-on. Here is how to remove add-ons in Firefox:
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-remove-add-ons
Another way these spammers are attacking people! They are so infuriating! I'd never heard of this approach before, that's very clever because it's hitting web site content which you think you know and trust. If anyone else has an linked words in orange let us know. You really do need to have your computers solidly protected with spyware, malware and virus protection. They'll reach you through dodgy web sites, emails and even just internet connections.
Michael has found a browser add-on in firefox called Yontoo. A quick google finds that this matches all the criteria of the problem. For anyone with the same problem, here is a google search on how to remove Yontoo:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=how+to+remove+yontoo&aq=f&oq=how+to+re...
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