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Scamsters Begin Abusing 2012 Olympic Games

According to investigators at Trend Micro the security company, scammers are already generating online scams using the upcoming Olympic Games during July 2010 in London as lure for potential victims.

The main scam, however, is related to a lottery distributing tickets, with twin phishing e-mail scams accompanying it, cautions Trend Micro.

One of these e-mail scams involves an attachment containing a .doc online form requiring recipients to complete it with personal details like his name, cell-phone number, address and others. Rather than tell recipients to supply the details directly into the main text of the e-mail, the scammers have chosen to provide the attachment hoping the e-mails would effectively dodge the filters, the security company points out.

Meanwhile, the main wave of spam mails provide spurious information to potential victims that they're winners of the London Olympics Lottery of 2012, a lottery game that poses as originating from the "National Lottery Board of UK." In that e-mail, recipients are directed for providing their sensitive details like own name, birth date and address that probably is an introduction to the infamous Nigerian scam or the 419 advance-fee scam. The victims are lured into paying huge amounts of money so they can claim prize money that actually doesn't exist.

Worryingly, the 419 scam is a traditional fraud that accompanies prominent sports like the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup.

Meanwhile, Symantec the security company during February 2011, mentioned of 2 separate spam runs, which attempted at cashing in on the Brazil scheduled FIFA World Cup of 2014 as well as the World Cup of 2022.

Remarking about the above assaults, Trend Micro said that incase the trend carried on then they would be the beginning of many more, which would abuse the "2012 London Olympics." Hence, it was strongly advisable that end-users overlooked such kinds of e-mails. Web-surfers seeking additional news about the said occasion must directly go to its authorized website rather than access search engine hits since such results poisoned with SEO techniques could lead to fake security software downloads that infected users' PCs. Trendmicro.com published this on May 12, 2011.

Related article: Scansafe Claims that malware Grew by 35% in April

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