Beware of scams that offer great deals on Mother's Day gifts

May 11, 2012 09:11 GMT  ·  By

As Mother’s Day approaches for millions of people worldwide, spammers focus their attention on users who want to celebrate this special day by offering gifts.

Many people want to express their love for their mothers by purchasing watches, gift cards, flowers, and even antiques. Fraudsters are well aware of this, so they’ve launched massive spam campaigns to promote their shady products.

McAfee experts have come across such spammy emails. Apparently they come in many shapes, carrying subjects such as “Make your mother happy”, “Mother’s day stock”, “Mother’s Day inventory”, “All about MOM”, “Mother’s Day extension” and many others.

In most cases, the offers are well designed, being accompanied by pictures and text written in big red letters to make them more attractive.

Many of the variants advertise “luxury replicas” or Rolex watches, flowers, and other types of gifts, everything at low prices.

However, security researchers warn that the links contained in these messages point to shady websites such as watchesbylr.com, lrwatchco.com, lrwristwatches.com, and lrluxurywatch.com. Internet users who order products from these sites expose themselves to a number of threats that may lurk behind the attractive-looking pictures.

So, let’s take a look at the possible scenarios. First of all, you may actually receive the product you have ordered, but keep in mind that purchasing something from the Internet that’s advertised via spam is like buying something off the back of a truck.

Just think of those Chinese iPhones that look like the real thing, but they come with VGA cameras.

The second scenario is that in which the link points to a site programmed to serve malware to its visitors. You can easily end up with a nasty Trojan that silently awaits for you to enter the password to your online banking account.

Finally, if you provide payment information to these sites, you may find that you’ve actually handed over your credit card details to some crooks that could later use them to make fraudulent purchases.