Phishing fraud involving the various shipping companies continues its upswing, and a newer version of FedEx fraud is looking to steal legitimate user’s account credentials.
Emails typically arrive:
Subject: Important Technical Service Message (CODE:90738-00)
From: “FedEx Technical Support”<update@online-update.com>
The are not sent from any legitimate Federal Express server, but instead are sent through hijacked user accounts, the latest copy reviewed came to us through Verizon’s servers:
So let’s say you’re expecting a FREE GRANT because they’re just giving away money to stimulate the economy. (It doesn’t really matter who “they” is at this point, any government entity will do.)
If this was the case, you wouldn’t find it strange to get an email from the European Union (EU), the European Commission (EC), the United Nations (UN), the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) containing “YOUR FREE GRANT INFORMATION” would you? more »
It’s not every day that the All Seeing Eye comes out in the open to bestow grants on random email address owners. Usually the Eye works from behind the scenes, which is why we thought this deserved some attention:
Freemasons have selected you to receive 2.5 million dollars and you don’t even have to join them! more »
Every so often we get the privilege of reading a laugh out loud funny fraud attempt.
Submitted for your enjoyment:
Subject: We are Not of Such Dirty and Illegal Characters
From: Western Union <westenunion11@live.com>
The subject alone is pretty funny but wait until you ready the message body.
We don’t even know where to begin with this one:
Subject: Central Intelligence Agency
From: Central Inteligency Agency
To: undisclosed recipients: ;
The Central Inteligency Agency. Really?
Many of our email fraud posts point out the lack of fluency in English displayed by the perpetrators. However, English is not the only language attempted by email con artists.
Throughout history iron pyrite has been mistaken for gold. It has raised and dashed the hopes of many a prospector and helped to bankrupt numerous investors.
Since the advent of email (and email fraud) a new kind of fool’s gold has appeared. This new fool’s gold comes in the form of an email from someone claiming to need help realizing a profit from the large quantities of gold in their possession.
Due to some unfortunate circumstance they are not in a position to benefit directly from the gold and need someone to “market” the it for them. Luckily for you they stumbled across your email address and decided to ask you to help them.
Yet another Phishing campaign is out and about and looking to steal your Google Adword’s user-name and password.
So far the emails we’ve reviewed are pretty straightforward:
Subject: Ads have stopped running
From: ”Google AdWords”<adwords-noreply@google.com>
But the “To:” field has generally been empty, which is a pretty big clue that the email is a fraud.
The sending address is of course spoofed. The email doesn’t come from Google but instead an compromised overseas mail server in this case.
An actual email is displayed below:
We couldn’t decide whether to put this in Email Fraud or The Lighter Side. The Lighter Side won out because it’s so funny in a pathetic sort of way.
A 78 year old Florida “granny” has been arrested for scamming over one million dollars out of her friends and pastor. Her crime spree began around five years ago after she was bilked out of over ten thousand dollars by a Nigerian lottery fraud scam.
