What this email would turn into, if I were to fall for it, would be a check cashing scam. They would send you counterfeit check(s) to do your shopping, ask you send a portion of the check to some other entity (sometimes they say another office), ALWAYS via Western Union (so watch out for that), you would deposit the check(s) and then use your own good money to do the actual shopping, only to find out later that their original check was fake and the bank has withdrawn that money from your account. You are out your shopping money AND the money you forwarded via Western Union.
Sometimes, the scammers are lazy and just go right for the Western Union part by saying they are a company that has been hired to secretly test the quality of Western Union's service, so they will be sending you a check and you keep a portion for yourself and wire the rest back to them and send them a report on the quality of the service. Of course, no one has been hired to do anything and you are out the money you wired back to them because their check will turn out to be counterfeit.
Received: from xolido36.xolido.com ([193.127.98.3])
From: Wal-mart (admin@walmart.com)
Reply-To: [walmart@superkingston.us]
Subject: Re: Job Opportunity
Will you like to Shop and Get Paid? You can earn as much as $2,700 monthly
working while carrying out a mystery shopping survey assignment for our company?
Shop details include dining out in restaurants, and carrying out secret survey
reports on Financial Institutions, and feeding us back with the activities that
transpires between you and the shop attendants. This is a form of feedback
mechanism to check on the activities of our staff for job performance
evaluation.
TO PARTICIPATE; KINDLY FILL IN THE FORM BELOW
-----------------------------------------------------------------
YOUR FULL NAME(s):
FULL RESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: Street Number/City/State/Zip Code.
Cell/Home/ Telephone Number:
Alternative Email Address:
We are well registered by the appropriate authorities and we are licensed to
operate under legal and licensed organization of the better business bureau,
Working with our company guarantee's you a safe relationship and licensed
establishment.
Your response would be highly appreciated.
Regards.
Task Co-ordinator
Gary Lockrey
WALMART SURVEY INC.
Thanks I smelled it, yet when I saw your post that confirmed it.
ReplyDeleteI get this a million times. There is no way to stop it. I tried hotmail.com "rules" with "opportunity" in the subject. I tried to block it, but they use a different address each time--always associated with walmart.com (which I do need). Examples are: walmart@walmart.com, opportunity@walmart.com jobs@walmart.com, etc etc ad infinitum. If I try blocking each one, then I soon run out of Microsoft's 500 item limit. No way to win against these guys.
ReplyDeleteHi there, your correct when stating that these guys are tricky, what I don't understand is how they can use the @walmart.com signature when this is registered and owned by Wal-Mart themselves. Anything can be placed before the @, the critical part of every address is always what is after the @, and its due to this that Iv been fooled so many times by these Idiots. Plus after you access past the Intro letter, I do believe that the application form is an authentic Wal-Mart form, which they have just replaced the destination address to their own receiver box. An as far as each of our own incoming mail, looking across the top menu of most mail inbox pages, the JUNK tab normally has a short drop down given a selection, to be able to report the choice of what best fits, the type of mail that you are reporting..... Which I believe after collecting a certain amount, the server may pursue the scam to track down its origin, but I assume they would act immediately on anything that may contain the risk of a virus !!!!
ReplyDeleteYou are right - that is exactly how scammers fool unsuspecting people. You can see from the header that the FROM has been faked by anyone replying will go to the REPLY-TO address which is not Walmart.
ReplyDeleteThen they make fake landing pages look official and collect all kinds of data.
One way scammers will not be caught is that they hijack the computers of innocent people and do their work from there. So tracing something back often does not get you to the scammer. And I think services that run servers are doing what they can to stop spam but scams kind of operate under the radar because they are just not at the same volume. Though now many email services let you report phishing scams.
They are insidious and successful because they have figure out a way to use weaknesses in the structure of the Internet.
I WISH there was an easier way to get rid of them.