2012 Olympics Become Spammers New Target

According to recent developments, the 2012 London Olympic Games is the new major incident being exploited in spam. Trend Micro, an online security agency, has found that the London Olympics is the theme of current online scams in which recipients are told that they are winners of the 'London 2012 Olympic Lottery.'

Like a typical spam mail, the current e-mail scam tells the recipient that he has won a lottery prize and he needs to get in touch with an agent to collect the prize money. The agent's contact details like e-mail address, fax, and phone numbers are given in the e-mail. Security specialists said that this is a scam to obtain the correct personal data.

Also, the security researchers at Trend Micro said that while comparing the new spam campaign with other spam campaigns, the sum of money given as the lottery prize is fairly small, so that the recipient get convinced that he has won it.

Moreover, to convince the recipient, spammers have used the original London 2012 logo along with an Olympic logo. They have embedded the International Olympic Committee's Website link - http://www.olympic.org. Further, the message contains fake batch numbers, misleading references along with false security codes.

However, according to Trend Micro, users must not trust these unexpected or unsolicited e-mails though whatever amount of money they pledge to give. Moreover, users should be careful about agents who claim to hand over the promised money. It is logical that winners of any lottery must first take part in the raffle. The security firm also said that its Smart Protection Network has already been blocking the new scam e-mail from getting through, as reported by SCMagazine on October 24, 2008.

It is worth mentioning that the 2008 Beijing Olympic was a major target for spammer. In that case too, spammers sent e-mails that talked of lottery claims and a tour to the Beijing Olympic in 2008. In all these scams, to make the e-mails sound genuine, the spammers design them like a normal "Winning Notification" e-mail for lottery.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 11/4/2008