Woolworths Lottery Competition Scam
A Woolworths lottery competition scam email has been identified by MailShark spam filters and leads receivers to a malicious website. Woolworths (also known as Woolies) are a leading supermarket chain in Australia.
This email will lead to a malware infection – all of the prizes shown are fake and used to get your attention. We recommend deleting the email from your inbox straight away. Keep reading to find out more about this scam attempt.
Figure A shows the Woolworths lottery competition scam email in question. It Is well branded to suit Woolworths and includes a mix of imagery and text.
Overall, the email is trying to trick you into clicking through to a dangerous website with the promise of prizes in a lottery style competition.
Note there is no personal greeting and small grammatical errors throughout the content. The email address of the receiver is also used (in black for privacy reasons) to give the illusion of a personalised email.
This email even provides a fake unique lottery number in a box and asks you to confirm – this is a tactic to increase the chances of you clicking through. You will not win any prizes from this email.
The subject line of the email reads “Play the Woolworths New Year Lottery!”. The sender is displayed as Woolworths, however the email address used is spam related and in no way associated with the official Woolworths website.
Clicking any of the imagery, buttons or links within the email will lead you to a malicious website. Even the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page is dangerous – you can check the destination URL of a link by hovering over it with your mouse.
Figure B is a safely captured screenshot of the malicious website you will land on if any links are clicked. Again, it is well branded and eye catching. Prizes displayed include a gift voucher and free supermarket goods.
This web page is designed to get you to click one more time, which will lead to a malware infection. Do not click imagery, buttons, or anywhere on this website if reached and close it immediately.
MailShark encourages you to delete this email and any similar emails from your inbox to avoid any possibility of a nasty infection. Woolworths does not have a scam reporting process but encourages receivers to report to the ACCC’s SCAM Watch in one of their latest scam alert articles.
Where in the world did the bulk of this Email come from?
Check out our Global Spam Sources page, for a World map of spam sources.
Steph Kent
MailShark
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