E-Mail Offering Compensation to Stranded Flight Passengers Reportedly Bogus

The Scam Detectives, a company based in Wrexham (Wales, UK), is investigating a malicious e-mail campaign which says it can assist airline passengers who are stuck because of the flight ban on account of the ashes that spread from the recent Icelandic volcano. The company is also the discoverer of the e-mail scam.

According to the e-mail, the senders are the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), who can help affected travelers get 2,000 pounds on payment of an administration charge.

Moreover, the e-mails do not ask for money only, but personal information too, especially passport details. The idea undoubtedly is to abuse this information for further fleecing the users once they reply to the bogus messages.

Remarking about the scam, CAA Spokesperson assured that the e-mail was not from the Authority, but from online scammers. Thinq.co.uk published this on May 5, 2010.

In addition to the Spokesperson, Editor of The Scam Detectives website Charles Conway advised netizens that in case they got an e-mail proposing a compensatory payment for being stranded in a foreign country, they must remove it right away without replying, as per the news published by BBC.co.uk on May 5, 2010.

Both the Spokesperson and the Editor warned that if anyone replies to the fake e-mail, he'll only lose all his cash from his bank account.

In the meantime, to avoid fraudulent e-mails similar to the one in discussion, security specialists suggested online users that they must know how to identify malicious, phishing e-mails by just looking at them.

According to them, phishing e-mails have some common characteristics. First, they aren't personalized i.e. the recipient's name is not used within the message. To put it in simple terms, they're junk or unsolicited e-mails. 2ndly, the e-mails instruct the recipients that they must give money upfront or send a fee so that any mentioned process can be expedited.

Finally, scammers defrauding people following a natural calamity isn't new. For, after the Chile earthquake and the Haiti earthquake, conmen began dispatching fraudulent e-mails to end-users pledging help. But, that was really one way for ripping the latter off personal information, as revealed by the federal agencies and security researchers.

Related article: E-Crime Reporting Format To Be Launched in July

» SPAMfighter News - 5/15/2010