Internet Security Company Trend Micro has issued a warning about a new scam on the go linked to the forthcoming world cup tournament which will take place in a couple of months.
The new scam will arrive as an email in your inbox and will come with an attachment claiming that you have won a prize and in order to claim it, will have to send your personal details to the sender of the mail.
“With the 2010 FIFA World Cup less than two months away, cybercriminals (as expected) are banking on this prestigious international football event to trick users” it says on the Trend Micro blog.
“TrendLabsSM spotted the latest threat involving this, and it came in the form of an email message currently being spammed in the wild” the blog continues.
The email attachment is a PDF file outlining details of the lottery that you have apparently won.
“What was interesting about the purported sender of the email—one Mrs. Michelle Matins, Executive Vice President—was also the signatory for the 419 scam, aka the Nigeria scam” wrote Jovi Umawing of Trend Micros technical communications department.
However, some of the emails retrieved by Trend Micro didn’t come with attachments and these were purportedly sent by a FIFA Vice President called Geoff Thompson.
“Further investigation revealed that “he,” too, was related to an old scam” said Trend Micro.
The first spam mail connected to the World Cup was identified by TrendLabs around a year and half ago, and that one was also about the recipient winning a lottery prize.
Trend Micro offers products that will protect against this kind of threat by blocking spam before it finds its way into your inbox. Although this type of spam protection isn’t always 100 percent accurate at identifying spam, as non spam will sometimes be identified as spam too, it is better than nothing.
“Users should be wary of more of these kinds of attacks or variants of these attacks as the sports event draws closer” wrote Umawing.
“CNN says that the 2010 World Cup is the first of the “social media age” and thus the world may see record levels of global interactivity surrounding the event” warns the security company.
So you have now been informed, no point in complaining after you’ve been ripped off so ignore these emails and any like them telling you have won a lottery prize. No decent organisation would be warning you of a big win by email anyway.
