Saturday, January 31, 2015

Rid yourself of "Zorpia" Scam crap

I recently experienced a barrage of emails and texts from friends asking me if I had sent them some sort of strange message using a social network called "Zorpia". I had never heard of this, and I instantly thought SCAM, so I looked into it. It turns out Zorpia is a social network based out of India and China, that uses unethical means to gain members. They hack emails, and steal people's contacts, and use other nefarious means to get you through various forms of trickery.



In my case, I discovered they had somehow gained access to my Google contacts through a third party authentication. That's kind of nerd-talk, but basically it means they got access to my contacts without me knowing.

FIRST-- look for an email from Zorpia in your junk mail, promotions, or Social tab in Gmail, welcoming you to their crappy site. Click the link to take you to "your" account, and remove/cancel it. Since you didn't most likely create the account, yo can try signing in with google- because that's most likely how they did it.

SECOND-- CHANGE YOUR GMAIL PASSWORD.

THIRD-- look for a Zorpia permission in your Google account settings.


Click your little picture, then Account


Under Security Checkup -click GET STARTED.

Go through the steps until you get to "Check your account permissions"


Under this section, I found one that said "Zorpia" in this section that these hackers had added. Click remove, and then Done. 

BOOM. No more giving Zorpia access to your stuff.



LASTLY-- (Optional) Set up 2-step verification for your google account. This makes it so only you can ever access your account, by using your phone as a sort of "key" to get in. Google has a good guide for this:

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/180744?hl=en

Stay safe out there!

-Isaac