Jan 11, 2011 15:42 GMT  ·  By

Security researchers from email security vendor AppRiver warn of a new phishing campaign which produces emails offering a reward taking part in a Coca-Cola opinion poll.

The fake emails began hitting people's inboxes yesterday and bear a subject of "Happy New Year." Their header has been spoofed to appear as if they come from a [email protected] email address.

The message contained within is a bit confusing, as it portrays the well known company as a polling organization interested in peoples opinion about current events.

"You have been selected to participate in a public opinion poll conducted by Coca Cola, a non-partisan polling organization. "The poll is about current events at the national level and your views about them. It is short and should take you only 5-7 minutes to complete. "All of your answers will be kept strictly confidential and will be used only for legitimate research purposes," the emails read.

Recipients are provided with a link to the poll page and in order to convince people to complete it, the emails offers $150 to every participant.

Users are taken through a series of redirects before landing on a page reading "Coca-Cola's Customer Satisfaction Survey," which doesn't seem to be consistent with the opinion poll mentioned in the email.

This pages asks for a wealth of personal information, including full name, address, driver's license number, mother's maiden name, home phone number, date of birth, as well as full credit card details.

The phishers claim this information is needed in order to credit the user's account with £150, which is more than the $150 originally offered.

"One interesting note about this page though is that upon inspecting all of the links on the page I noticed that most of them do in fact link to the Coke website however, four of them at the end in yellow actually link to McDonald's websites.

"This is either a sign that this phishing page is being recycled from an old McDonald's scam, or it was part of a misconfigured phishing kit," says Fred Touchette, security researcher at AppRiver.