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UEFA e-scams haunt football fans

The upcoming finals of the UEFA Championships League and UEFA Cup on the Old Continent got spammers and phishers attention. The result is the latest spam campaign targeting mobile phone customers from UK.

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. Most likely, cybercriminals collect a fee for each SMS, but they do not give any ticket to Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadium or Stadio Olimpico in return.

Unlike the previously depicted example, the spam messages exploiting next year's FIFA World Cup employ a five pages attached Word document, heavily loaded with images and formatting elements, which should persuade the recipients that they are the lucky winners of an "Internet Raffle".

Although this type of spam drastically reduced over the previous three semesters and barely reached 2%, as we shown in the latest issue of BitDefender E-Threats Landscape Report, it seems that it is still appealing for fraudulent purposes, probably due to layout and formatting options.

Two amusing inadvertences are worth mentioning: one refers to the e-mail addresses of the alleged Finance/Claims Director, which are registered on a free e-mail service (i.e. Gmail^TM); the other concerns the photos of the previous lottery winners and their cheques - one can clearly see an US flag in the left corner or the Michigan Lottery Logo in the background.

In the days to come, chances are that the scams developed around these three events to grow in number and complexity, as they did, for instance, during the Beijing Olympics, when cybercriminals managed to purloin illicit gains of $ hundreds of thousands, as well as a huge amount of sensitive data (bank account, credit card and passport details) from Americans, Australians and New Zealanders.