False Mass Mailings Simulating A Spanish Lottery Notice
PandaLabs has recorded a new case of a fraudulent email message being sent to thousands of addresses. This message invites recipients to collect a prize (which does not exist) that they have supposedly won in a draw from 40 million email addresses and names of people and companies. The email message sent is the following (some paragraphs and the contact details have been removed):
FROM: THE LOTTERY COORDINATOR,
INTERNATIONAL PROMOTIONS/PRIZE AWARD DEPARTMENT
DEAR WINNER, RESULTS FOR CATEGORY “B” DRAWS Congratulations to you as we bring to your notice, the results of the Category “B” draws of GOLDEN LOTTERY SPAIN. We are happy to inform you that you have emerged a winner under the third Category, which is part of our promotional draws.
[-¦]
You/Your Company, attached to ticket number 3322/6181-33, with serial number 92-71 drew the lucky numbers 19, 21, 25, 30, 41, 44 (22), and consequently won in the Category “B”.
You have therefore been awarded a lump sum pay out of 500,000.00 (Five Hundred Thousand Euro) in cash, which is the winning payout for Category “B” winners.
[-¦]
Your funds are now deposited with EURO INSURANCE & SECURITY COMPANY SPAIN, a reputable security and insurance firm in the SPAIN, insured in your name. In your best interest and also to avoid mix up of numbers and names of any kind, we request that you keep the entire details of your award strictly from public notice until the process of transferring your claims has been completed, and your funds remitted to your account. This is part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming or unscrupulous acts by participants/non-participants of this program.
[-¦]
Please contact your claims agent immediately, to begin your claims process;
MR.NELSON WHITE OPERATION ( Manager)
EURO INSURANCE & SECURITY COMPANY (EISC)
Foreign Service Number: +34 6XX XXX XXX [omitted]
EMAIL: XXXXXXXXXX@yahoo.es [omitted]
For due processing and remittance of your prize money to a designated account of your choice.
[-¦]
NOTE: For easy reference and identification find below your reference and Batch numbers. Note that you are to forward this email to the Security and insurance firm in your first correspondence with them, whether by email or tel.
REFERENCE NUMBER: GLUK/6181/11-02/05
BATCH NUMBER: 1811-TH
Congratulations once again from all our staff and thank you for being part of our promotions program.
Sincerely,
THE LOTTERY COORDINATOR,
GOLDEN LOTTERY SPAIN.
N.B. Any breach of confidentiality on the part of the winners will result to disqualification. Please do not reply to this mail. Contact your claims agent
The message stresses the importance of keeping the prize anonymous (“Any breach of confidentiality on the part of the winners will result to disqualification”), which is used by the fraudsters to cover themselves against possible complaints from those that receive this message.
When recipients contact the lottery agent, they are asked for personal details, and then for a commission before collecting the prize as a fee for acting as intermediary. The purpose of requesting the personal details and the commission is to provide either direct income or indirect income from selling these details on the black market.
“As unbelievable as it may seem to win a prize in a draw that you didn’t even ask to participate in, or even though the level of the English used in this email is shaky, these types of actions often achieve their objective. In order to avoid falling victim to these actions, our advice, as with the phishing phenomenon, is to reject all communications that seem to come from a financial entity that you have not strictly requested and in the case of banks, remember that these entities will never contact clients via email in order to check their personal details,” explains Luis Corrons, director of PandaLabs.
Panda Software has already contacted the Spanish authorities to neutralize this fraud scam and, at the time of writing this press release, the contact specified in the email message was no longer available.