Latest scam spam ploy: Bogus pay-by-phone London parking receipts

Bogus "pay by phone parking receipts" doing the rounds by email and targeted at UK users are actually designed to spread malware, security watchers warn.

The spam campaign is designed to trick recipients into viewing a fictitious list of parking transactions, contained in a malicious attachment. "Upon executing the malicious attachment, the malware opens a backdoor on the affected host," Dancho Danchev, a security researcher at Webroot explains.

Webroot and many other anti-virus vendors have added detection for the malware, Gamarue-I, associated with the campaign. But the safest course is to ignore dodgy emails, which pose as receipts from Westminster City Council.

Sample screenshots of the malware touting spamvertised emails can be found in a blog post by Webroot here.

Westminster City Council actually has a Pay by Phone parking service so the scam messages are more plausible than is normal for malware ruses, especially in cases where recipients of the dodgy messages happen to live in London or have driven there lately. ®