World Cup 2010 has already attracted its first “classic” lottery scam. According to MessageLabs Intelligence, users are being spammed with an e-mail apparently from the “Canada Lottery - Soccer World Cup 2010 Promotional Draw”.
The basic premise is that the recipient has won a large sum of money, and in order to get the winnings, needs to contact someone (usually a webmail address), or e-mail personal details to a webmail address. In the e-mail, the recipient is asked to “gently download the attached document”. This as opposed to “roughly” downloading it?
At first glance it appears the scammers are trying to get the recipient to send an e-mail to richdon@gala.net containing confidential, personal details. As well as it being highly likely that the recipient’s e-mail address would then be added to some kind of scammers’ ‘sucker-list’ (lining up the recipient for many more scam e-mails in future), recipients can almost certainly expect a follow-up call or e-mail requesting an advance fee, in order to release the supposed lottery winnings.
As is so often the case with advance fee fraud scams or 419s, the initial e-mail is just the beginning, or first stage, of an often quite elaborate scam.
The links provided in the e-mail and in the “gently downloaded” attached PDF document, are to a legitimate Canadian Lottery results website. The scammers have simply chosen a lottery date from this site and referred to it in their scam.
Remember the odds of winning legitimate lotteries are stacked heavily against the punter, your chances with these ”classic” scams are nul!