14 DAY TRIAL // Holidays are a great time for cybercriminals to exert their social engineering talent and dupe users into providing valuable information or make a small wire transfer in exchange for the promise of a big win.
Since Easter is just days behind in the Orthodox tradition, crooks have launched a malicious email campaign in an effort to make some money, claiming that the recipients of the deceitful messages have been selected as the winners of a significant cash prize.
Crooks make the message as credible as possible
The amount promised is £950,000 (€1.32 / $1.4 million) and winning it was supposedly the result of a raffle organized by Microsoft’ UK division, as part of an alleged Easter Promotion.
To make the message credible, the cybercriminals attached a PDF file that contains the logo of the company and pictures with senior management staff at Microsoft UK.
Getting the money is just a matter of replying to the email with personal information (for verification purposes) within 29 days, and keeping quiet about it.
The details requested include full name, address, nationality and gender, age, occupation, phone number and country. All this could be easily used to carry out different types of scams that could cause financial damage to the victim.
Demands for paying various fees never stop
However, Hoax Slayer says that continuing the conversation leads to shelling out a small fee, “to cover unavoidable expenses such as tax fees, banking charges, and insurance costs.” It appears that the scammer will insist on paying these before the alleged cash prize is transferred, citing legal reasons.
Obviously, no money will ever be delivered, but the crooks will try to get as much from the victim as possible, inventing all sorts of additional fees that need to be paid. This is a classic advance fee scam that is known to have caused gullible individuals tens of thousands in losses.