NY Holds Spam Scam Contest

evilquaker writes "The state of New York's Consumer Protection Board is running a contest they call 'Spam and Bologna'. Their goal is to help educate the public, so fewer people will fall for Nigerian scams (and others) in the future. The contest is actually to find the most outrageous example of an email scam, and ends in one month. Yahoo! News provides some more information."

Comments

Re:Another great one

[JaredOfEuropa]

This is just total genius...

Actually, I have received this particular one, both in the "Citibank" form and in the Dutch "Postbank" reincarnation, which is basically a translation of the original one.

You scoff, but the scam spam I received did not have a single spelling error in it (a small miracle in itself), and to the untrained or trained but lazy eye, the letter, URL, and the website might very well appear to be legit. And no, not everyone knows that your PIN should never been given to anyone. I imagine that these scammers have harvested quite a few accounts. This is easily the cleverest scam spam I have seen in a long while.

ebay scam

[mm0mm]

Lately I have received a few emails that claim to be originated from ebay. It said my account will be suspended permanently. I sent email to real ebay and it turned out these emails are total scam. This one looked very authentic, as was it plain as real mails from ebay. Here's the copy of the mail:

******************

SafeHarbor Pre-Suspension

Dear customer,

We regret to inform you that your eBay account will be suspended due to the violation of our site policy below:

* Misrepresentation of Identity (User) - Representing yourself as another eBay user or registering using the identity of another. Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way.

This includes the registering of a new account. Please note that this suspension does not relieve you of your agreed-upon obligation to pay any fees you may owe to eBay. According to our site policy you will have to confirm that you are the real owner of the eBay account by completing the following form or else your account will be deleted.

http://cgi3.ebay.com/aw-cgi/ebayISAPI.dll?SecureCo nfirmation&bpuser=1

Our apologies for this unconvenience.

Thank you for using eBay!

http://www.ebay.com

***************

For a moment, I thought this was authentic. But after a few seconds I found holes in this scheme. The mail was in html (unusual for ebay) and the link is actually blank and it redirect to another page (login-secure-online.tk) that disguise ebay's official page with authentic ebay logo and looks (the page has been taken off after several minutes of the arrival of the mail). The page asks you to enter credit card number, PIN, 3digit security code, both of the last two are absolute no-no in any circumstances anyway.

I would vote one for this email as one of the best scam, but sadly, we know who the winner is only if and when the perpetrators are arrested.

Re:ebay scam

[therealking]

There are a number of VERY authentic eBay and PayPal emails going around. Complete with authentic looking webpages they link to.

The latest paypal one also contains LOTS of real links to paypal's website, except for the one that counts which asks you to "confirm" your information.

Wow So we're not the only one's..

[ZeroExistenZ]

My brother got an order of 700 harddrives, and sent me the email to analyze it cause it sounded somewhat *too* shady. After he negotiated a reduction for the huge order he got a contact adress in Nigeria. well.. First the person claimed to be an employer of a GameSpy(tm) affliate in the US and the order looked realistic, after my brother stated every European shipment would be out of charge (the negotiated reduction) a Mohammed was put on handling the order, someone stating being a contact person but this time we were linked to a completely different company in France. (you know, the footer in those emails.) They found only 3 airline companies that *only* would be *acceptable* to use the shipment (???) to Nigeria (after I tracked down the adress) We happily told them to get there harddrives somewhere else.. Thought it was just us getting these shady offers.. :-\