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
[SPOTLIGHT]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