Interested in a 20-40% discount for dinner at your favorite restaurant? Obviously this sounds like a delicious offer, especially if you only have to provide your personal information and interest in a job offer. However, when we checked out these job offers, we found many similarities to the offers discussed in our earlier blog on Italian job offer scams. This time around, spammers felt the need to use a different approach. So, they are offering recipients discount coupons that they claim are valid in all of the renowned restaurants in town. In return, all they want is user information, such as:
• Name
• Year of birth
• City name
• Favorite restaurant
• Number of visits to the restaurant
• And most importantly, spammers want to know if the user is interested in a job as a manager or consultant with an attractive weekly pay.
Below are some of the sample offers in the messages:
• Would like to work with us as manager of sales and receive remuneration from 310 a week working from home?
• Would like to work with us as a consultant and receive remuneration from 230 a week working from home?
This is a known type of scam that involves the illegal activity of money laundering. Here is an example image of the spam message:
Translation of the Message Header and Body (Italian to English):
Subject: Within 1-7 minutes you will receive a discount from 10% to 35% at a dinner at any restaurant.
Message:
You will receive a coupon valid for a discount of 25% at a dinner in a
5 renowned restaurants in your city, in a major Italian city
by filling our mini-questionnaire with information about:
1. Surname and name;
2. Your age;
3 - The city where he lives;
4. Favorite restaurant;
5 - How often goes to the restaurant?
6. Would like to work with us as manager of sales and receive a
remuneration from 310 a week working from home?
Send replies to this address: [message details removed]
We will send a response containing a discount coupon and a number
staff, which will be printed and presented to the restaurant!
Yours sincerely!
Another variation of the scam involves enticement in the form of an online quiz competition. Here, the scammer invites recipients to participate in an online quiz and win huge rewards. If recipients want to win the competition, they will need to answer a few questions related to an oil company. On checking the message, we find that the email address provided inside this message does not belong to the sponsoring company. If the user responds to such emails, it will indicate an active email address and may provide encouragement for scammers to employ fraudulent methods to cheat those users. As always, Symantec advises that email users ignore such unsolicited and unexpected email offers.
An example image of a message for the online quiz competition scam:
