Fake Charities Send Phishing E-mails Related to Haiti Earthquake

CIFAS, the Fraud Prevention Service of United Kingdom, has alerted that a new surge of e-mails is hitting inboxes. These e-mails pretend to collect monetary donations to help those who were victimized in the recent Haiti quake.

While purporting to have come from a charity representative or a charitable organization, these e-mails have been described as callous messages. They try to exploit real human suffering as well as people's desire to help.

In one example of these e-mails, the message arrives from Help the World (a non-registered charity with the Charity Commission). Another example of bogus e-mails has been tracked to ME Foundation, which too is a fake charity.

Richard Hurley, Communications Manager, CIFAS, states that these phishing scams blackmail people emotionally and cheat them. They often use fictional language in the messages or copy the texts from some well-known source and combine them with a donation method. Consequently, the scammers find it little difficult to convince the e-mail recipients into doing what the former want, as reported by Debtmanagementtoday on February 24, 2010.

Owning to the latest e-mail scam, CIFAS has urged everyone getting such an e-mail to discard the message from their mailbox. They should not reply to the e-mail with money, as it will certainly go to the fraudsters, the Service warns.

In the meantime, other organizations along with CIFAS have identified this scam. When the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) conducted an investigation, it made similar conclusions like those of CIFAS.

As per the Corporation, it identified several scam e-mails, with one posing as a message from the British Red Cross. However, the message's origin was a PC in Nigeria, experts found. Another scam e-mail exhibited the UNICEF logo; however, it had no link with the organization.

Hence, security specialists conclude that if anyone wants to help victims of the quake, he should utilize established donation websites. While donating via the Internet, donors should visit www.dec.org.uk. This will help their donations reach the genuinely needy individuals, instead of fulfilling the criminals' greed, the specialists added.

Related article: Fake Spam Mail Announces Australian PM’s Heart Attack

» SPAMfighter News - 3/5/2010