The e-mail flood with advance-fee fraud subjects does not seem to come to a hold! Sometimes you supposedly have a rich uncle in Africa and should inherit his properties; a wealthy benefactor wants you to take care of a charity donation and manymore unbelievable scenarios. The variety of invented pretext is almost endless, but the aim is always the same: financial fraud!
Today’s special is a mail in German language which promises “One million Euro”. This is, according to the criminals, a one with eight zeros: “€1.000.000.00 Euro”. Even after an e-mail inquiry and the unambiguous question “How much money do I win? 1.000.000 € or 1.000.000.00 €?” the answer remains the same: “Your prize of €1.000.000.00 Euro (One million Euro).“ Interesting!
We can identify several names and addresses involved:
- We received the spam mail from roo*****s@yahoo.es, without name indication.
- We are supposed to answer to a Mr. Javier Lopez from the sales dept. - he uses an AIM mail address.
- The prize notification is signed by a Ms. Ana Miriam
After the first inquiry, we received another name:
- Mr. Lopez orders us to transfer money to a Western Union account of Kingley George.
- Furthermore, we need to send a completed form to the “European Internation Claims Centre”:
Surprisingly, this form is now in English and not in German. The fact that this form asks us to reveal detailed personal information to fill the scammers’ database is less surprising.
The paper gives us another hint: The “European Internation Claims Centre” claims to have a connection to the Ventura24 S.L., which is the Spanish offshoot of the German Tipp24 SE. This Spanish organization already popped up in Nigerian scams years ago to function as factor of credibility. The amateurishly inserted Microsoft Certified Partner logo does not inspire much confidence either.
Considering the ambiguous amount of prize money, the variety of many different persons involved, the use of free webmail providers, the fake membership and cooperation claims (Ventura24 S.L. and Microsoft), the poor language skills, the Western Union account and the fact that we did never take part in a lottery – Why on earth would we even think about transferring 580 Euro as a handling fee and expose a lot of private data?