Bait and Switch

Definition

Bait and Switch is illegal, but is still rife today. A company or retailer will lure customers to its store by advertising a product at a very low price. When the customer arrives at the store looking for the great deal, they are informed that the product is not available. (E.g. sold out.)

The disappointed customer is then presented with another offer as a “consolation prize”. The fraudulent aspect is that the original cheap offer used to entice the customer into the store never existed, and was simply a means by which to expose the customer to another product or get them to purchase a more expensive item.

Applications in the Field

Rogue Media Software:

Many of us have done it. We have downloaded BitTorrent files of our favorite movies and television programs.

They realise they have to download certain software in order to view the video file.

Now, unless they live in a country where the download speed is 60MB+, the video file will have taken hours, sometimes even days, to download. After waiting for so long already, a person is highly committed to accessing the download. The trick however is that 3wplayer or domplayer software, such as recommended above, are rogue media player software application bundled with Trojans that can infect computers running Microsoft Windows. This means even after downloading the recommended software, the video will still not play, and the person’s system is now infected.

In fact, they were the victim of a bait and switch trick.

Bait: the promise of a free download movie.

Switch: they didn’t download a free movie at all, simply a large file. The real intention was to get the person to download the “player software” so that the creator of the software can install a Trojan on their computer.