March is Fraud Awareness Month, and police service organizations around the province have been submitting articles about various kinds of fraud, including email and online scams. They have also talked about other interesting scams such as romance fraud, identity theft and vehicle purchase scams.
Unfortunately the pressure on space in our newspapers has prevented publication of them all, but they have all been published on our website (www.newsoptimist.ca) under the Follow the Sirens feature. Take the time to look them up. They offer some excellent advice and insight into the dark minds for fraudsters.
The timing of an email I received Tuesday is ironic, considering its context within the police fraud awareness campaign.
The missive reads (with poor grammar and strange capitalization and punctuation intact): Dear Lucky winner, We wish to inform you that you have won (One Million British Pound Sterling) in the Microsoft Online Monthly Lottery held this month of March with Ticket Number (EKT/LTUK/5319) and the Lucky Numbers (BTUK5213SX) (03) For claim of Prize, please forward to us 1.Name: 2.Address 3.Age: 4.Sex: 5.Phone: 6.Country: 7: Ticket Number and Lucky Number Contact: Mrs. Rita Hall. [email protected]. Congratulations once again. Yours faithfully, Mrs. Rita Hall. On-line Coordinator.
Whoa, that's exciting. I tried to look up what one million British pound sterling translates into in Canadian dollars, but the process confounded me. I expect it's a substantial pile of moolah.
Of course the excitement was purely tongue in cheek, as I received an identical email in the inboxes of three different adresses and my newsroom colleagues also received it.
We laughed it off, but the very fact the newspaper receives about a dozen emails a month with bogus pleas to help some poor widow in Burkina Faso claim her husband's estate and variations on the scheme, means the scammers must have some success with those less skeptical.
Cyberspace is a scary place, folks. Keep your guard up as there are bottom feeders all across the globe trying to get their sticky cyber fingers into your bank account and your life.
