The 419 scammers have now begun to send out phoney emails claiming a Rugby World Cup lottery can win you millions.
As the Rugby World Cup kicks off, there are signs that the underworld has launched a 419 lottery scam to coincide with the event.
Emails are being sent out claiming the recipient can win millions in the so-called World Cup Lottery.
While it is a lottery of sorts for some of the participants in the real World Cup, what’s known as “advance fee fraud scammers” are beginning to send out mails which say:
“You have been awarded $2,5m in a lottery connected with the 2011 Rugby World Cup”.
But a Symantec Intelligence blog update says “you can’t win a lottery you didn’t enter”.
Still, many South Africans and others continue to be caught out by these fraudsters.
“Since 31 August 2011 we have noticed a rise in spam and phishing related to the World Cup. We anticipated seeing the rise of activity as we did for the 2010 world cup and any major social event in the past 5 years. we have seen a number of versions of this type of scam linked not only to the lottery but also to rugby tickets scams themselves,” Jayson O’Reilly, Security Practice Manager, Symantec.
O’Reilly says many of the 419 scams originated out of Nigeria. However, he says Eastern European countries are becoming delivery arms of scams as well.
The blog warns that “recently we have seen scams taking advantage of unrest in Libya, the devastating March 2011 earthquake in Japan, and other events” and the Rugby World Cup is no different.
The 419 scam usually somewhere has a demand for an up-front fee to be paid to release the millions.
Then the scammers disappear.
“Unfortunately in today’s financial climate the promise of riches will draw many people to its opportunity and that is exactly what the scammers are hoping for. Some of the recent stats released by Symantec in its August release of the ISTR highlighted 75% of all mail in August was spam and one in every 207 mails was a phishing attack. 419 plays a part in these stats every year,” O’Reilly told Business Day Online.
If you receive a message promising you vast sums of money, or claiming that you have won a lottery which you haven’t entered, ignore it.
Symantec’s blog says “if an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Source: Business Day
Discussion
Comments are closed.