Football lottery scam targets UK punters
Big Cup con
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Fans of Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United are being targeted in a new email scam that attempts to trick recipients into sending premium rate text-messages in the hope of winning non-existent Champions League final ticket prizes.
The ruse promises entry in a draw for a chance of a seat at the Stadio Olimpico on 27 May but promises only to empty fans' pockets, net security firm BitDefender warns. The Champions League and similarly-themed Uefa Cup scam are aimed at mobile subscribers and began circulating earlier this week, before Liverpool and Manchester City were knocked out of the competitions.
"Under the false appearance of a lottery that offers tickets to the final matches, the text-based spam invite recipients to send text messages with the name of their favorite team to a specific number," BitDefender analyst Razvan Livintz explains. "Most likely, cybercriminals collect a fee for each SMS, but they do not give any ticket to Sükrü Saracoglu Stadium or Stadio Olimpico in return."
Livintz adds that the scam follows in the wake of World Cup lottery scams explained in more depth here. ®
COMMENTS
60999 scam 'follow the money'
It appears from comments made on the internet referring to other problems that MX telecom is the company that 'owns' 60999.
Txtnation is just one of a number of resellers. These are revenue share short codes. MX telecom must know which reseller they are passing the revenue to for this premium rate 'service'. In turn that reseller must know which client is using which keyword/code in order to pass on the revenue.
Under the Phonepayplus code the revenue should be withheld (by the network/presumably MX telecom in this case) for 28 days before being passed on. This was introduced supposedly to stop this type of fraud. It obviously has not. The fact that this withheld revenue is used to pay any fines that Phonepayplus may decide to impose on the scammer possibly explains this.
Of course if this type of fraud was reported to the police nobody in the revenue chain (including Phonepayplus) would be allowed to touch any of that money.
already tipped off txtnation
got this at work last week and informed txtnation. No reply from their sales dept. seems they know all about this already and dont care. Phonepayplus might though when they get round to investigating it
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