E-mail Scam Poses Threats to Egyptians Consumers

An e-mail masqueraded to be sent by a consultant with the former Egyptian president, Muhammad Hosni Mubarak, seeking help from people for moving money and assets out from Egypt has been making rounds on the internet. This activity is resultant following the recent changes in the country's government, as reported by ctwatchedg on February 19, 2011.

This e-mail includes a malicious link, which loads viruses or tracks software in the computer of recipient, if clicked mistakenly. Commenting on the matter, William M. Rubenstein, Consumer Protection Commissioner stated that, this example is a glorious instance of how easily innocent people fall easy prey of cyber crooks on the ground of sympathetic issues, as reported in the Press Release of Department of Consumer Protection on February 18, 2011.

Mr. Rubenstein further added that, in this endeavor of looting innocent people, who can be even influenced to send money or their account numbers, unintended viruses are only greeted in a compromised computer.

Amazingly, some cyber criminals use malevolent software for collecting e-mail addresses from compromised machines. The information collected from compromised systems is further customized to suitable topics to hack systems further in this trail.

Spammers generally pursue a method by which, exclusive destructive links are sent in each of the spam e-mail. Victims may receive several versions of the link (<http://dfnasdunf.example.org/>, <http://vnbnnasd.exaple.org/>) along with the same e-mail. By tracking the most requested links from web servers, spammers can easily make out legitimate addresses of the victims or simply target victims for repeated spam attempts.

Undoubtedly, numerous scam letters and e-mails containing typo and grammatical errors should be immediately discriminated and held for being scrupulous. In this case, the Egyptian e-mail contained several misspellings, even in the name of the former Egyptian President.

Thus, a user should never entertain an e-mail from a stranger or an unknown organization and open it or any other attachment enclosed with it. The government suggested general public to forward any such suspicious e-mail at spam@uce.gov addressed to the spam database of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC along with its law enforcement associates utilizes this database and files cases against spammers.

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

» SPAMfighter News - 2/25/2011