Subscribe in a readerFIFA World Cup Lottery Scam
The FIFA World Cup is scheduled for 2010 in South Africa and scammers have already started using this news to trick people into giving out their personal details.
A new scam email is sent to people telling them they won a lottery. The email is full of interesting things to catch people’s attention such as a large dollar amount ($850,000) and social tricks such as asking them not to tell anyone about their winnings.
At the end they ask the recipient to send them a few personal details, which the scammers then use to steal money from your bank accounts.
The email uses broken English and is full of "official looking" random letters and numbers.
Below are some quotes from the scam email. If you receive this email just delete it.
South Africa FIFA World Cup 2010
Government Accredited Licensed!!
Online National Lottery South African
2009/REF:EAASL/941OYI/04&
Batch: 12/25/DC34 RE:LOTTOYour email have luckily won the sum of USD$850,000.00
Which subsequently won you the lottery in the 2nd category i.e. match 5 plus bonus. You have therefore been approved to claim a total sum of $850,000.00 USD… In cash credited to file KPC/9080118308/02. All participants for the online version were selected randomly from World Wide Web sites through computer draw system and extracted from over 100,000 union associations and corporate bodies that are listed online this promotion takes place weekly.
Our agent will immediately commence the process to facilitate the release of your funds as soon as you contact him. For security reasons, you are advised to keep your winning information confidential till your claims is processed and your money remitted to you in whatever manner you deem fit to claim your prize. This is part of our precautionary measure to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program your request to fill the information below.
And it goes on and on.
Some people who fall for these things have never entered a lottery, but they want to believe it so much that they don’t stop to consider why they were selected.
Now you might be wondering who could possibly be so foolish to fall for lottery scams. In fact, a large number of people fall for these things. In Australia alone (and with a small population of 21 million) 329,000 people lost money to lottery and phishing scams in one year. 3.6 million people fell for these scams in USA. Imagine how many people worldwide fall for these things.
Not everyone in the world reads Fraudo.com. You can help by talking to people about lottery scams, making them aware of what they are and how they work (there’s more information here). Help educate people, especially those who are less tech savvy or might be desperate for money. You could also help them subscribe to Fraudo.com – get them to enter their email address in the top right corner of this page, sometimes email is an easier way to receive these updates.
Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition
Ad-Aware is a popular anti-spyware product made by Lavasoft. This protects Windows PCs from adware. Adware is a term for programs that installs themselves on your PC and show you ads – it’s generally a bad thing.
They’re just released version 8 which they’re calling their Anniversary Edition. They have a free edition and 2 paid editions, each with different features.
If you download the free edition remember that you’ll need an anti-virus program on your PC (one that scans web pages as well as your PC).
Main Ad-Aware web page (has all 3 editions): http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware.php
Direct download to the free version: http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-Anniversary-Edition/3000-8022_4-10045910.html?part=dl-ad-aware&subj=dl&tag=top5&cdlPid=10998841
Beware Of Fake Obama News
A lot of people are talking about Barack Obama, it seems to be a big news topic right now. Scammers have taken advantage of the media hype and have started publishing fake news sites.
These fake news sites are designed to get your attention and to go to their web page. Their web page then attempts to install malware on your PC.
Some of the fake headlines include:
- Barack Obama has refused to be a president
- Haven’t you heard latest news about our president-elect?
- Barack Obama abandoned sinking ship
- Obama doesn’t wany [sic] anymore to be a president
These fake sites have a professional look and feel. If you don’t have a good anti virus package installed it’s very likely your PC will become infected and you won’t know about it. The infection forms part of a botnet, meaning it’s under the control of someone else and will be used to commit online crimes.
So be cautious about these fake news articles. It’s highly unlikely that Obama has changed his mind at this stage. Use a good anti virus package that also scans web sites. And don’t use Internet Explorer, start using one of the popular alternative browsers such as FireFox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari.
Whenever something big happens in the news there are people that will always take advantage with made-up sensational headlines, designed to trick you into opening their web pages.
First Windows 7 Antivirus
If you’re giving the beta version of Windows 7 a go you now have the option of installing an anti-virus package. Kaspersky has released a version of their anti-virus system that will work on Windows 7 beta.
If you’re using Windows 7 beta for anything more than testing and evaluation you should really consider installing it. Kaspersky’s website is: http://www.kaspersky.com/windows7
Credit Card Fraud – Fake Confirmation Number
If you work in a retail store or any other business that accepts credit cards in person, please be aware of the follow fraud tactic that was recently used.
- 2 customers walk into a retail store
- They select $8000 worth of products
- At the checkout they present a credit card
- The credit card is rejected
- The customers say something along the lines of
"Oh I knew that would happen. Please call my bank, here’s the number"
- The store attendant calls the number provided by the customers
- The person at the end of the phone approves the purchase and gives the store attendant some kind of confirmation number
- The customers walk out of the store with $8000 worth of products
The number they gave wasn’t a real bank’s phone number. It was their friend answering the call.
Lesson to be learnt? Don’t call the number given to you by the purchaser. Look it up yourself or call your phone company’s directory service.
The full article is here.
Buying Free Software
Recently some people have been tricked into paying for OpenOffice.
OpenOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. You can download it for free from here: http://www.openoffice.org/ . Don’t download it from anywhere else other than the official site.
If anyone asks you to pay for this then they’re trying to cheat you. There’s no reason to pay for the software, and there are no subscriptions you need to use it.
Disclaimer: while the software is free for anyone to download and use, you need to have an internet connection, and most people pay for their internet. This is just common sense. If this is a problem, sometimes computer magazines download it for you and put it on a DVD bundled with the magazine. Again the software is free but you have to pay for the magazine. This too is common sense. And it’s completely legal to copy it from someone else.
In-Session Phishing Attack
A new way of stealing internet banking passwords has been discovered. Here’s how a victim would see it:
- You’re reading a few web pages on the internet. One of them is infected with some malicious code – you don’t know.
- You log onto your normal internet banking site
- The malicious code on the other site detects that you’ve logged into internet banking
- the malicious code bring up a window asking you to type in your internet banking password again, giving you some excuse as to why you have to log in again
- The malicious code sends your password to a 3rd party who uses it or sells it to someone who will
How can this happen?
I won’t go into the technical explanation, suffice it to say that most browsers will trust and run code under certain conditions, and hackers have discovered how to exploit those conditions.
It works because it knows what banks to look for and won’t do anything until you log into your internet banking. So to a casual person it sounds plausible that they need your password again.
What can be done to prevent this?
- When you use internet banking close all the other tabs you might have open. Just keep the internet banking page open by itself.
- If you get a popup window to enter your password again you need to decide if the popup window is really from your bank.
- Does it look the same as your normal login screen?
- Is there a good reason why you have to enter your details again? (e.g. if you don’t use the internet banking page for 10 minutes it might time out, but otherwise it shouldn’t have timed out)
- Does it have the SSL icon? This is often a padlock icon on the top right corner, if you click on it it should identify your bank.
The makers of web browsers (Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, etc) need to address this issue. When they do it’s up to you to update your browser to the latest version. Then this particular problem will go away.
Below is a press release from a banking security company offering more information on this type of attack.
http://www.trusteer.com/files/In-session-phishing-advisory-2.pdf
Symbian S60 SMS Exploit
If your phone uses Symbian S60 (see the list below) then it’s vulnerable to a new threat some people are calling the curse of silence.
It happens when someone sends you a specially formatted SMS. Some phones that receive this special SMS stop working properly – they won’t receive any more SMSs (it crashes the SMS messaging system inside the phone).
On some phones this means it just doesn’t receive any more messages and it won’t tell you there’s anything wrong. On other phones there will be a message that says:
Not enough memory to receive message(s). Delete some data first
The SMS that causes this to happen can’t be seen in the phone’s inbox, so you can’t delete it.
Turning the phone off and on sometimes lets you receive one message before it stops working again – this seems to vary depending on the phone model.
It’s also good to know that making and receiving calls still works.
What can you do?
It’s not a common problem yet and hopefully it won’t become one. For now it requires someone to send you the special SMS – it doesn’t spread by itself like viruses do.
It’s also a good idea to make a backup of your phone’s data now before anything bad happens. Some phones have an option to do this easily. Consult your phone’s instruction manual for more info.
If your phone is affected your choices are fairly limited at the moment.
- You can perform a hardware reset on the phone. You will lose all data on the phone if you do this (phone book, messages, most probably photos, etc). Think carefully before doing this.
- Phone manufacturers might release a firmware fix soon. Nobody’s promised anything yet.
- Contact the company you bought the phone from, they might be able to help.
- A security company called F-Secure has an antivirus package for mobile phones that they say can fix the problem. They also have a 7 day free trial that you could try. Apparently you need to download their program directly from the phone. Link here: http://mobile.f-secure.com/downloads/trial/index.html
More Info:
There’s a video on YouTube that demonstrates how it works. Link here.
Phones at risk:
Nokia: E63, 5800, N85, N79, E66, E71, 5320, 6220, N78, N96, 6210, N82, E51, N81, N95, 6121, 6120, 5700, N77, E90, E61i, E65, 6110, N76, N93i, 6290, N75, E62, E50, 5500, N93, N73, N72, N92, N71, N80, E70, E61, E60, 3250, N91, N70, N90, 6682, 6681, 6680, 3230, 6670, 6630, 6260, N-Gage QD, 7610, 6620, 3660, 3620, 6600, 3600, N-Gage, 3650, 7650
LG: KT615, KT610, KS10
Samsung: I7110, INNOV8, SGH-L870, SGH-G810, SGH-i560, SGH-i550, SGH-i450, SGH-i400, SGH-i520, SGH-D730, SGH-D720
Panasonic: X800, X700
Lenovo: P930
Siemens: SX1
A New Year
It’s now 2009. I started this site in 2007 with the intention of helping people understand online fraud. Things are coming along nicely.
In 2008:
- I published 174 new articles on this site (for a total of 229 articles). My goal was 200 new articles so I’ve slacked a bit.
- 8493 people used Fraudo.com when looking for information about scams, fraud, etc.
- 576 people wanted to know if it’s ok to give out their bank account details to strangers (I answered this question here)
I also introduced an email subscription service. Enter your email address in the top right corner of this page and you’ll receive an email with all the latest updates.
Fraud, scams, and viruses are bigger problems than ever so I’ll continue my efforts on this site. The best way to overcome these dangers is through education, so continue reading this site and let everyone know about it.
All the best for 2009,
Enrique.
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