Fake emails that claim to originate from the organizers of the London 2012 Olympic Games have been spotted offering £800,000 (1 million EUR or $1.2 million) to the “lucky” recipients.
London 2012 Olympics-themed scams have been making the rounds in the past few months and it has been clear that it would only be a matter of time until a fraudster came up with a lottery scheme based on this topic.
The folks from
Hoax Slayer have found a variant of such a fake lottery email that purports to come from the Games’ promotion manager.
“Your E-mail address is one of the 9 lucky selected winning Email Address that won in the London 2012 Olympic Campaign Promotion; you have won the sum of (£800, 000.GBP) Pounds, i wish to congratulate you on this Nomination. Below are your identification numbers, kindly fill the below information’s for official Records,” reads the hastily written notification.
Recipients are requested to reply with their name, country, address, phone and fax number, marital status, occupation, gender and age.
Once these details are provided to the scammers, they can use them not only for phishing campaigns, but also in advanced payment fraud. In these types of plots, the victim is asked to wire a certain amount of money that’s allegedly needed to complete the transaction.
As in all similar situations, no one ever wins anything, except for the crooks that run the plot. That is why internauts are advised never to trust lotteries and contests they haven’t enrolled in.
In reality, no organization will hand out prizes by selecting random email addresses. Also, users can look for easy-to-spot clues that can uncover a scam’s true purpose.
First of all, the sender’s address should not be something like
lottery@hotmail.com. Secondly, the notification has to be properly written, without typos and grammar mistakes. Finally, suspicious attachments and links to third-party websites always indicate a malicious scheme.
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