Thu Sep 25, 2003 7:19 am
The best Internet Scam I''ve seen yet
I've seen plenty of spam mail with those obvious scams like the Prince Ooodakanuu from Africa needing to get his family fortune out of the country and needing to transfer to a foreign account. For a percentage which you will receive he will use your account to do just that, all he needs is your account information.
Well this one I just found is the most thorough I have ever seen. Gift Stakes sent me a "You have won an X-Box" email, I actually signed up for a contest through MS one time for an X-Box and this email said it was from GiftStakes & MS so I thought I'll check it out.
They gave me confirmation link and number. I go to the ascribed site and get a Certificate Authentication popup. This looks great. So far so good. On the where to send the prize page they have a secured connection, this looks legit right.
On the address form where the free prize is to be sent they state "that due to fraudulent requests for prizes, they must charge a shipping fee." Again, a lot of companies don't want to shell out all the money for a free prize, I can understand that.
But then they say this:
Don't nobody working with MS have merchant account issues. First real red flag. So they ask for a debit card, but to make you feel better they say this:
All the things are necessary for what they ask, until it gets to the PIN number. There is no reason for them to have that. MAJOR RED FLAG.
I begin looking through the site, it looks Completely legit they have everything, great graphics, well organized, previous winners (although I wondered where they got the pictures from being an all email service), Privacy policies and Terms & Conditions with legalese (a bit shorter than usual and something about harm caused by the product, but still seemed good).
They have a page telling about themselves, their address says Nevada. The Terms & Condition legalese said something about operating in the state of California. Maybe California has a necessary statute that has to be met, not quite a red flag here.
So, I'm not entirely certain because everything is pretty thorough as I said. So I search on yahoo for the site. It doesn't come, you can go to it directly, but the search doesn't pick it up. Big clue. Second a link to a register site for SCAM cases is linked. I click on that and sure enough this site has been flagged as a Scam.
If you want, check out the site and tell me if you're impressed with the thoroughness to which these scammers have gone.
Sir Spectre
.... Ours is not to reason why, but to fly or fry!
Edited by - Sir Spectre on 25-09-2003 08:21:24
Well this one I just found is the most thorough I have ever seen. Gift Stakes sent me a "You have won an X-Box" email, I actually signed up for a contest through MS one time for an X-Box and this email said it was from GiftStakes & MS so I thought I'll check it out.
They gave me confirmation link and number. I go to the ascribed site and get a Certificate Authentication popup. This looks great. So far so good. On the where to send the prize page they have a secured connection, this looks legit right.
On the address form where the free prize is to be sent they state "that due to fraudulent requests for prizes, they must charge a shipping fee." Again, a lot of companies don't want to shell out all the money for a free prize, I can understand that.
But then they say this:
Updated 20-10-03: We are sorry that we can not accept credit cards at this time, due to issues with our merchant account.
We do hope to have credit card available as an option as soon as possible.
Don't nobody working with MS have merchant account issues. First real red flag. So they ask for a debit card, but to make you feel better they say this:
Please note: For your security, any debit card information submitted here is processed directly by Authorize.Net and is not kept on our server.
All the things are necessary for what they ask, until it gets to the PIN number. There is no reason for them to have that. MAJOR RED FLAG.
I begin looking through the site, it looks Completely legit they have everything, great graphics, well organized, previous winners (although I wondered where they got the pictures from being an all email service), Privacy policies and Terms & Conditions with legalese (a bit shorter than usual and something about harm caused by the product, but still seemed good).
They have a page telling about themselves, their address says Nevada. The Terms & Condition legalese said something about operating in the state of California. Maybe California has a necessary statute that has to be met, not quite a red flag here.
So, I'm not entirely certain because everything is pretty thorough as I said. So I search on yahoo for the site. It doesn't come, you can go to it directly, but the search doesn't pick it up. Big clue. Second a link to a register site for SCAM cases is linked. I click on that and sure enough this site has been flagged as a Scam.
If you want, check out the site and tell me if you're impressed with the thoroughness to which these scammers have gone.
Sir Spectre
.... Ours is not to reason why, but to fly or fry!
Edited by - Sir Spectre on 25-09-2003 08:21:24
