Spammers Turn to Offering Plastic Instead of Green

After switching their bait, cybercriminals are tossing out the line again, hoping some unsuspecting reader will bite and send them their personal information.

After sifting through the misspellings and grammatical errors, you’ll find that you’re being promised an ATM Card with $1,200,000 on it. All you have to do is send them the address you’ll want it sent to.

Here’s the email:

From: UNITED NATIONS office201140[at]yahoo.com.vn
Reply-to: francis.zinsou[at]live.com
Subject: Attn; Beneficiary

Attn; Beneficiary

Greetings Dear, The UNITED NATIONS IN Affiliation with HSBC BANK have agreed to compensate you with the sum of US$1,200,000.00, for self support. This is regarding the draws he organized before he left the office to help individual’s town a self charity organization to help the less privileged children.

This includes every foreign contractors that may have not received their contract, inheritance sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government problems and the World financial Crisis etc. We found your name in the list of those who are to benefit from this compensation exercise and that are why we are contacting you.

Now We are contacting you to let you know that  your Fund has been programed in to an ATM CARD on your behalf worth $1.2 US Dollars in your name for your self charity organization and compensation the necessary arrangement of delivering the ATM CARD has been made with SKY COURIER/SECURITY COMPANY Benin Republic, The will send you ATM Visa Card which you will use to withdraw your money via ATM MACHINE in any part of the world, and the maximum daily limit is Five Thousand United States Dollars ($5,000.00).

Please write a letter of application to the given address below with your receiving address where you want them to deliver it.

Contact Person:

Dr.Obi Ginter
E-mail:(skyservice@skymail.mn)
Phone +229-993-283-84
Registration Reference No of the Package FDXB/xxx/100
Code Number:xxxKP/229B

Yours Faithfully,
Jean-Francis .R. Zinsou
Permanent Representative to the United Nations

As you can see, this phishing email carries all the classic signs of a phishing email scam:

1. Despite claims that the message is coming from a “Permanent Representative to the United Nations”, the email was sent using a free Yahoo account. By the way, “.vn” is the country code top-level domain for Vietnam.


2. You’re instructed to reply to a different email address than the one the email is allegedly sent from. This is a typical request from scammers as the sender’s email address is usually spoofed. In this case, you’re asked to respond to skyservice@skymail.mn, which supposedly belongs to the company that’s supposed to deliver your card. Whatever.


3. You’re asked to provide personal information for monetary gain. Don’t you think if you had some sort of “contract” with someone that they’d already have your information on file?


4. It's rather obvious that English is not the spammer's first language.

Feel free to report this email or simply toss it into your computer’s trash bin.

Should you like to report it, you can either:

• Report it to SpamCop.


• Forward the email to the FTC at spam@uce.gov. Make sure you include the full email headers.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter @hyphenet and “Like” us on Facebook for the latest tech news and PC security threats. 

Photo Credit: TaxBrackets.org