Tokyo Denki University, Japan.

Abstract—Currently, there is an increasing number of prize scams in which users are tricked into entering their personal information to claim that they have won a smartphone or other device. In addition, the scams are not only led by email or SMS but also by Google searches in some cases. Users who access a linked page (Entrance page) from a search result are redirected to a scam page through several intermediate pages. In SCIS2021 and SCIS2022, we collected and analyzed redirection chain logs to reveal the reality of such a prize scam. First, in SCIS2021, we surveyed to gather records of redirect chains. However, we could conduct only 99 small surveys due to manual collection. Next, in SCIS2022, we obtained 496 redirect chain logs through an automatic display of redirect chain logs but could not implement automatic log determination. Therefore, this paper proposes a tool to automatically collect and determine the records of redirection chains using Power Automate Desktop. Furthermore, we will disclose the scam methods and sound a warning by highlighting such scam campaigns.

Index Terms—Power automate desktop, prize scam, redirect chain.

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Cite: Mizuki Takagi, Konan Nagashima, Kazunari Mitani, Masatake Shirai, Taiichi Saito , "Automated Collection of Redirect Chains from Search Results Pages to Prize Scam Pages ," Journal of Software vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 86-98, 2023.

Copyright @ 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0)