Unsuspecting Internet users may be presented these days with an email that claims they won $1 million (700,000 EUR) in the Microsoft Lottery, but, in reality, there is no such thing as the Microsoft Lottery.
“We wish to congratulate you once again in this note, for being part of our winner selected at the beginning of the year 2011 Microsoft/Nokia/Aol Online award Anniversary. Microsoft & AAOL in Conjunction with Nokia cell phone are currently running a beta test and for this had set out $1,000,000 for these winners,” reads the phony email provided by
Avira.
In this case, the crooks wanted to make sure that as many individuals as possible fall for the scam and that’s probably why they mentioned both AOL and Nokia along with Microsoft. If someone were to think that there is no Microsoft lottery, they may believe the part about the money offered by AOL or Nokia.
This is nothing but a scam, cleverly set up with the purpose of making victims provide personal information that’s allegedly needed to process the payment.
If at first the user is required to fill in a form with his name, date of birth, gender, occupation, address, country, phone and email address, later he may be asked for details that relate to his bank account.
To make sure recipients don’t tell others about the scam, the fine print of the email advises winners to keep a secret the fact that they won the money to “avoid fraudulent claims.”
This is not the first time when a major company’s name is utilized in a fake lottery.
Facebook, BBC and Yahoo lotteries were also the subject of similar phishing attempts and that’s why it’s important to ignore such outrageous emails.
Internauts are recommended never to hand out sensitive information as a response to a suspicious looking email.
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