Ask questions of these high street shopping quiz 'giveaways'
How does a £1,000 voucher to spend at Tesco or Argos sound, just for taking a quick quiz? If you answered "too good to be true", you are correct.
In common with millions of other people, I shop at Tesco and also at Argos. And because I have signed up for something or other from their websites at times, I receive regular emails from both stores.
I am used to emails such as Tesco's recent free cream with strawberries offer or Argos telling me of some special deal on televisions or tablets or toothbrushes. But these are never personalised – they are just lists of online links to their websites where I can find more details.
Now, however, I have a second type of email with the sender shown as Tesco or Argos. These are personalised starting with a “Hi, there, tony.levene” even if it's only my email address that has a dot in the middle.
Seeing double
I have had several emails from both and oddly enough the contents are identical. They start with “tony.levene we are waiting for your confirmation” (this is also the subject line of the emails), as though I had ordered something.
Then it continues: Greetings - You are selected as a possible recipient of
a GBP 1,000 shopping voucher that you choose:
(Tesco, Argos, Carphone Warehouse or HMV) .
There are some scam giveaways here. No UK company (outside of hedge funds or currency traders) uses “GBP” – Great Britain Pounds – because virtually every keyboard in every UK firm has a £ sign. I would write £1,000. And I can understand someone spending £1,000 over time at Tesco or Argos but at Carphone Warehouse or at one of the few remaining HMV stores?
The email then continued:
We are delighted to announce that you are among a select few from your area that have been chosen to join our exclusive web panel.
1. dan.b.murphy
2. tony.levene
3. chelseastevens83
This is nonsense. What is my area and how many is a select few? And the names either side of mine appear on each and every email from this source.
I am sure there are real Dan Murphys and real Chelsea Stevenses but none that I know or could find locally. This may have something to do with the fact that all these emails, whether supposedly from Tesco or Argos, come from the same spam factory in North Carolina.
Quiz time
To get my £1,000 voucher, all I had to do was “take our quick 30 second survey to qualify to enter”. Qualify to enter is like saying go to school to take your A levels.
But I took the test. Five questions – gender, age, Facebook user or not, online shopper or not, and which store voucher I'd like. It does not matter how you answer – you are always 'qualified' to move to the next stage.
And if you are daft enough to fall for this next bit, you could end up wasting £234 in a year as joining up to win the voucher costs £4.50 a week. This is taken from your mobile phone bill by Optimus Mobile, a company in south west Germany.
It operates a game called Quiz 2 Win. To get the £1,000 voucher, you have to answer a series of ten quiz questions each week and the fastest in any seven-day period goes forward into a twice-a-year draw. So not only do you have to beat everyone that week (and it is measured to the one-thousandth of a second) in speed and accuracy but also be the first out of the hat. Each six-month competition period adds up to £117 on uour phone bill for the remote chance of winning a £1,000 voucher.
Courting controversy
Optimus Mobile and the associated Quiz 2 Win are no strangers to controversy. In August 2013, using its emergency procedure, premium rate phone regulator PhonepayPlus referred the Germany-based set-ups to its tribunal. In a 17-page adjudication, the Tribunal found that “very serious” breaches of its code on premium rate phone games: that they were unfair, misleading and potentially harmful as they could cause fear, anxiety, distress or offence. At that time, the prizes were various Apple products.
Additionally, it failed to follow PhonepayPlus Guidance on Promotions and promotional material, on competitions and on other games with prizes. Optimus was fined £25,000.
I looked again at my emails. The real Tesco ones come from Tesco Food and Wine. Unfortunately, both the pretend Argos and the real one say Argos.
More on scams:
Gameover Zeus: scam that could empty your bank account in a fortnight
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Comments
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electricblue - that was a joke right? Generally people are expected to be on line these days, encouraged by government and business. It is very difficult to interact with either without being on line and if you resist they make it difficult for you. The internet is touted as a means to an end which is what it should be. Are you suggesting that even a when a country's security agencies are hacked it is their own fault? Each time a scam is discovered the criminals find a new way to get to people. I hate they way some people blame the victim and not the criminal. We should all actively try to make as many people aware as possible of these tricksters and how they operate. It is all very playing the smart**** but most of us live in the real world. eb I don't know why you even bother reading these pages unless it is to show off at how 'clever' you are.
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These spam emails may perhaps be from North Carolina, but perhaps one should not be so sure. I sometimes try to discover the origin of my spam/malware emails by finding the appropriate (usually the oldest) IP address in the "Received:" records of the email header and using http://en.utrace.de/ to tell me where that is located. I sometimes forward them to the phishing department of their claimed originator (bank, hmrc, land registry etc.) and inform them of that apparent origin. However, a few days ago I realised this may not be valid: the deceptive emails might have been sent, on the orders of the real originator, from an innocent computer that has been turned into part of an illegal "botnet" when its owner him/herself believed a malware email and opened (i.e. executed) the attachment which then installed itself and so joined the botnet. (description of botnets here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet) This doesn't, of course, affect the point of Tony's argument. Oliver
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There may indeed be plenty of stupid and gullible people out there who get taken in by these same old scams, but Lovemoney is hardly the forum for these reminders. Better to point out the basics of reviewing source code and sender domains and impart basic verification skills then have some reference articles for readers to look at. There is little to no excuse for being taken in these days. If you are online, it takes seconds to paste a few details into Google with the word 'scam' and see what comes up.
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15 June 2014