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Lure theme

Fake meeting or conferencing app

A page imitating Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams that reports the call cannot start, usually blaming the microphone or camera. The remedy on offer is a pasted command. This theme is normally reached through an invitation rather than through browsing, which makes it the most targeted of the set — and it is the one most often aimed at macOS.

First reported
2024-08
Targets
Windows · macOS
Campaigns on record
3

Approximate. Meeting-themed pages are reported from around August 2024 and expand through 2025, including in targeted campaigns against people working in cryptocurrency.

Also reported as Fake Zoom page · Fake Google Meet · Fake Teams meeting · Microphone driver error lure · Meeting join error

What a victim sees

A convincing join screen or in-call error: platform colours, the usual row of controls, perhaps a participant tile, and a modal saying a device could not be initialised or a driver or codec is missing. The pressure here is supplied by the victim, not the page — someone who believes they are late for a meeting will try the first fix they are given. The instructions are presented as ordinary troubleshooting and are tailored to whichever operating system the page detects.

Described rather than shown. This site publishes no screenshots of lure pages and reproduces none of their markup, because a working copy of a fake verification page is a fake verification page regardless of why it was made.

The tell-tale sign

Conferencing platforms diagnose devices inside their own application, and their fixes are buttons. Check the address bar as well: a real Meet, Zoom or Teams link lives on the platform's own domain.

The underlying rule is the same for every theme on this site, and it is the one worth remembering: no legitimate website will ever ask you to press Windows+R, to open Terminal, or to paste anything into either one. Why that rule holds.

Campaigns using this lure