E-Gold Phisher Scam
Summary:Email claiming to be from electronic currency service, E-Gold, attempts to trick recipients into providing personal information on a bogus website.
Status:False
Example:Collected online, 2004
Dear e-gold user
As you may have heard, to celebrate e-golds dominance of the
e-currency market,between now and the 31st of February, the
worlds leading market makers have joined forces togive you the
chance to win $500 worth of e-gold every day! That's right,
every single dayuntil the 31st of February,
one e-gold user is GUARANTEED to win $500 in e-gold!
Simply login to your account and the 500th user to login each day automatically wins!
What's more, every 100th user logging in from the link above will be entered into our "Grand Gold
Super Draw", which will take place on 1 March 2004.
Prizes for the Grand Gold Super Draw are as follows:
1st Prize - $500
2nd Prize - $250
3rd Prize - $100
Terms and conditions of this promotion:
Only one competition entry per user may be made from the above link per 24 hours. Multiple logins within 24 hours from the above link will be declared void. All winners will be
notified via their registered email address within 48 hours of logging in. Deposits will be made
into winners accounts within 5 days of email notification. For the purposes of this promotion, each
day will begin at 0.00 GMT.
A list of all winners will be made available upon request from 3 March 2004.
Commentary:
Electronic currency service, E-Gold, has been the target of
several phisher scams in the past. The Dumaru-Y worm also tries to collect e-gold passwords from infected computers.
One such scam email, sent in HTML format to more easily disguise hyperlinks, tries to trick unwary e-gold customers into providing account details on a bogus website. The email falsely claims that e-gold is running a competition and that the "500th user to login each day automatically wins".
There is no competition, nor would E-Gold ask customers to log on to their accounts via a link in an email.
The E-Gold website has an
information page about these fake emails. The page states in part:
PLEASE BE ADVISED E-GOLD WILL NEVER SEND YOU AN HTML EMAIL WITH A HYPERTEXT LINK ASKING YOU TO CLICK ON THE LINK TO ACCESS YOUR ACCOUNT!
Write-up by Brett M.Christensen
