Written on January 22, 2012 at 10:57 am by Jennifer Brown

Dunkin’ Donuts Phishing Email Scam

Filed under Scams {4 comments}

Image via Wikipedia

There is yet another Facebook gift card scam making the rounds and probably filling your junk box. Dunkin Donuts is the latest victim of these kind of phishing scams.

The email has an urgent message asking you to claim one of 10 free gift cards worth $100 (the terms may change as this scam makes it way around the web and morphs with each incarnation.) the reader is asked to click on a shortened link taking them to god knows where.

Don’t click on the link

If you receive one of these gift notices from Dunkin Donuts or any other brand name go to their website and search for giveaways. If the company is having a great giveaway you can be sure it will be found on their website.

As always, if you know of any email scam let me know so we can share it with everyone.

Avoiding Identity Theft from Phishing Scams (turbotax.intuit.com)
Lawyer Phishing Email Scam Alert: Brett Abraham chases Eric Muller for a debt (thetrialwarrior.com)
Phishing Season Never Really Ends (turbotax.intuit.com)
” Scam & Phishing – Popular modus operandi on the Web” Beware…. (gbhfi.wordpress.com)
Beware of Adobe updates, Amazon gift card scams (msnbc.msn.com)

Jennifer Brown tagged this post with: Confidence trick, Crime, Dunkin Donuts, E-mail fraud, Facebook, Gift card, Identity theft, Phish Read 178 articles by Jennifer Brown

http://nourishourselves.blogspot.com Marie

I am no techno-whiz but I have gotten pretty good at recognizing right away when something is not what it says it is. About 12 years ago I received a series of phishing e-mails purporting to be from Ebay. They sent me so many, it was like a tutorial in what to look for: weird syntax in the message, an e-mail address that had a lot of extra words in it (in other words, not just ebay.com), misspellings. I don’t know if security software got better or I just became less interesting as a victim, but they stopped and I rarely get one from anywhere anymore.

The FB stuff can be really distressing when you see someone who is earnest and kind forwarding what you know is a bogus post, but they don’t know. A clue for FB scams is having to accumulate a certain number of ‘likes’. That should set off a red flag. And then I check Snopes.com. They are a great resource. The other day a friend of mine on FB posted a heart wrenching picture of a baby in an ICU. The message was if there were 100 clicks, the child would get a heart transplant for free. That sounded wacky right there. I checked Snopes and sure enough, that one has been floating around for a while with different variations.

I really hate that because I don’t want to be the one to say “um, they just made a fool of you”. So I don’t. I figure the person has forwarded it with good intentions and I am not going to be the one who embarrasses them. Usually what I do is a separate post about frauds and encouraging people to check our Snopes before forwarding messages.

Thanks for the post Jennifer!

http://www.redheadranting.com/ redheadranting

Hey Marie, do you want to write a post on this subject? You seem to know an incredible amount about it. Would love guest post from you .

Checking scopes.com is a great idea. I forgot all about that site and it really is great resource for emails like these.

Of course I get the emails from the barrister in London asking to deposit several millions of pounds into my account because one of his clients died leaving him with no one to inherit his money but me. That is big tip off to me and I can’t see how these work but I suppose there are people out there who are desperate and are willing to try anything.

http://nourishourselves.blogspot.com Marie

Do you mean to tell me I’m not an heiress after all?!?! Waaahhhhhh!!

lol

Sure, I’d be happy to do a post. Thanks for asking!!