Google reviews raffle. Real gift from Google
Letters with notifications of winning the lottery appear with enviable regularity in our mailboxes. All of them are built on the same principle: the user is told that he won a huge amount in a certain lottery and must contact a certain official from among the organizers in order to receive it. It's tempting. Alas, these notifications are just .
To receive a “winning”, the user will be asked to deposit from several hundred to several thousand dollars to the specified account under one pretext or another: this may be a commission for transferring winnings, a tax, a fee for opening a bank account, etc. These expenses often seem insignificant to the “lucky person” compared to the amount acquired. But having received the money, the scammers simply interrupt all contacts, and it is almost impossible to find them.
Be careful and don't fall for the bait!
Signs of a "lottery" scam
How to understand that you have a letter from a scammer?
The answer is simple: any lottery win notification you didn't participate in is fake.
At this point, the reader may ask the question: what if I really participated in the lottery and hope for a big jackpot?
If a prize draw actually took place and you actually participated in it, you will be contacted by name (or by the number of the lottery ticket that you bought), and the letter will contain the address and name of the company organizing the draw.
Fake win notifications can look different. Many are written with gross errors. On this basis, you can immediately distinguish a fake, since editors and copywriters work in the staff of serious lottery companies.
There are also fakes that are written without errors and beautifully designed, but they were sent from a public mail server like gmail.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com. However, a message from a serious company is always sent from a corporate address.
In some fakes, you will be asked to send a response to an address different from the one from which the letter was sent, for example, to the address of some "agent" or "manager".
In other words, there is bound to be some strange inconsistency in the fake notification.
Congratulations...
Here are the most typical, in our opinion, "lottery letters" - with the most typical tricks of scammers.
European Lottery…in Nigeria
One letter reports winning the "European lottery":
“Your address has been selected for a $500,000 prize in the 2011 European Lottery. To claim your prize, please contact our agent in Lagos, Nigeria. Contact person: Mr. Marshall Ellis, e-mail:<…>, telephone:<…>.
Congratulations!
Vincent Kilkenny (Coordinator)"
The words "Your address Email was chosen" or "Your address won" - a clear sign of fraud. You didn't provide your email address for the prize draw, did you? (And if they provided it, it is unlikely that it was in the European lottery).
The request to contact, who for some reason uses the address on the public service live.com, could strengthen us in the idea that we are facing spam, if we had not already realized this: after all, lottery organizers do not give their private addresses in letters sent to participants lotteries. All correspondence of this kind must be sent from corporate addresses. Besides, if the lottery is European, then why does Mr. Ellis live in Nigeria?
Well, especially meticulous users may be curious about the euroonlinelottery.com domain from which the letter was sent ... You guessed it: such a site does not exist. The browser will redirect you to wn.com (World News). Alas, there is no lottery at this address. Yes, and it wasn't.
Lottery without the knowledge of the participants
The second letter promises a win in the Coca-Cola company lottery, but for some reason it was sent from Yahoo!'s French server:
If we ignore some stylistic errors, the translation will be as follows:
“Dear winner! This is an invitation for the winner of the promotional lottery of the Coca Cola Company. Kindly contact your Prize Manager, Dr. Greig Williams, for instructions on claiming this week's prize. From now on, you will receive our promotional offers and invitations to participate in Coca Cola surveys. (You can unsubscribe at any time.) We would like you to stop being skeptical, as this prize is indeed from The Coca Cola Company, England. The most important thing for us is to notify you that you have won the amount of five hundred thousand British pounds in this draw. Please make sure you claim your prize as soon as possible. Congratulations! The Online Coca Cola Company.
As we can see, some scammers calculate the reaction of their victims and, just in case, explain to them that a lottery without lottery tickets is not a scam. Here is another example, probably extremely convincing from the point of view of its authors:
We will not translate this long message in its entirety, allegedly sent Google Let's take a look at the second paragraph. It says: “The online draw was carried out with the help of random selection email addresses from an exclusive list of addresses of individuals and legal entities, collected using advanced computer searches on the Internet. However, tickets were not sold and ticket numbers were assigned to addresses in order to maintain representativeness and confidentiality.”
big names
Making the victim fall for the bait is easier if the "lottery" is carried out on behalf of some well-known organization. For example, the same Coca Cola or Google. And it can also be BMW, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Yahoo!.. Unfortunately, these companies cannot do anything about unknown scammers using their names for their own purposes.
The letters talk about lotteries held by large companies, in the files attached to these letters - regular messages about "winnings". I wonder why representatives of all these companies send letters from public mail services like Gmail and MSN?
If you receive an email like this, check the company's website to make sure there is no lottery running there. And if you enter the words “Coca Cola lottery”, “Yahoo lottery”, “Google lottery”, etc. in Google search, you will see links to articles describing this type of fraud, with examples of messages and even with stories of fraud victims .
My yours don't understand, or Lee Chin
The Google Translate service has made life extremely easy for online scammers: if earlier their target audience was limited to their compatriots, now they can send letters all over the world. We regularly receive such notifications in broken English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Polish, Norwegian and other languages, not to mention Russian.
Here are examples of the joint work of attackers and an automatic translator:
Of course, we do not assume that any of our readers would consider such a creation of computer-linguistic technologies as a real notice of a real win, but just in case, we urge everyone to be vigilant. The organizers of real lotteries will not distort Russian or any other language in this way.
Be carefull!
Examples of emails with fake win notifications are endless. According to Kaspersky Lab statistics, the number of such notifications in spam ranges from tenths of a percent to three percent, which is thousands of letters per month. To avoid becoming a victim of scammers, follow simple rules security:
- Don't believe that you could win a cash prize in a draw that you didn't participate in.
- Do not trust emails that have been "run" through an automatic translator or simply contain obvious errors.
- Pay attention to the e-mail from which the message was sent: lottery organizers do not send letters from free mail services.
- If you think that the letter is about real winnings, check all the data using search engines. The names and phone numbers of senders, the name of the lottery - all this, perhaps, can be found on the Web with detailed comments.
- And most importantly, remember: free cheese only happens in a mousetrap!
No, we are not talking about a PR update, although Google presented a “gift” there in quotation marks, reducing the performance of several projects. It didn't really affect me, just a little annoying. But today is not about that.
I'll start, perhaps, from afar, so that everything is in order. I have a so-called literary blog, which I kind of jointly run with another person. So at the beginning of the year, Google worked on its servers, while changing the name of the feed - the prefix feeds to feeds2. And in the course of this process, some kind of oversight happened and my completely normal RSS address for a literary blog was forcibly replaced with another similar one. At the same time, a letter of apology was sent to the post office saying “we didn’t want to, it happened for technical reasons. Please forgive us and receive a small souvenir from us as compensation for the damage.”
I immediately started to google and saw that the problem was not only with me alone, but with google groups one of the employees confirmed the information officially. Therefore, without fear of falling for a trick, I filled out my address data and sent them to the office.
After a month or two, I even forgot about this case, or rather, I switched all my attention to another message from Google - the cherished one was waiting. How then one day they brought home an invoice or an air waybill (what the hell is it called), where it was indicated that my precious cargo had arrived on FedEx. Which, by the way, was supposed to cost me $25 in shipping costs. The mysterious Electronics: Others was listed as the cargo type.
Googling a little more and finding the sender's address, I realized for sure that the package was from Google, but what I saw in some online store frankly disappointed me :) There were simple flashlights, flash drives as much as 128 MB and socks for mobile or players. Yeah, I think it would be cool to get some kind of trinket for $ 25, a couple of times more expensive than the cost. But on the other hand, this is a package from the states + some kind of experience or something. Therefore, having previously agreed, I went to FedEx to receive my priceless cargo.
To my surprise, the box was not small and not so light. When I got home, I found the following:
First a general view...
A box in a box and another in a box - this is such a chip)
Gothic casket
... and it contains a webmaster's travel kit!
So that everyone knows who I work with :)
In short, the set was wireless mouse, pen, usd hub (thing on the right) for 4 connectors and an adapter. In principle, not bad :) It will come in handy on the farm.
Tomorrow, by the way, I will also go to a seminar on the methods and nuances of promotion in the bourgeois Internet, I will learn smart things, plus I will get some information for my projects and new blog posts. So stay tuned.
Yes, almost always it is a fraud and a money scam.
Those who run "competitions", "raffles for iPhones", "promotions" on VKontakte, Instagram and other social networks, publish ads like "I'll give it away, I'll give it away for a repost, I'll choose a winner at random" are scammers in the vast majority of cases.
The scam is simple:
- A competition, drawing, lottery with tempting prizes is announced (iPhone or other smartphone, tablet, laptop, game console, hoverboard, headphones, camera).
- Naive people make reposts or write to scammers that they want to participate.
- They are ALL answered that they won, they are ready to send the prize, you just need to pay for shipping, insurance or something else.
- After payment, the victim’s page is blocked so that they don’t bother with questions about when she will receive the prize.
Often scammers don't even run "competitions" but simply send messages to people that "I chose you as the winner" or "the system chose you as the winner." It's just bait for suckers. There will be no iPhone.
Report scammers using this guide: How to report a person or group on VKontakte and mark incoming messages about winnings as spam. Read more about how you are being deceived below.
How to understand that they are scammers?
If you “won a prize” and they demand money from you for sending, delivery, for reservation, for paying tax, customs duty (customs clearance), insurance, for some other services - this is a scam and a scam. When it's written "The prize is paid for by the winner"- there is nothing to catch. If they write "Delivery at my expense", they will ask you to pay for something else. They convince you that you are obliged to pay a gift tax - that's when you receive a gift, then you will pay (and in any case, not to a fraudster). Money is usually asked to be transferred to a Qiwi wallet, Yandex wallet or by card number. Almost always scammers are in a hurry. For example: "If we don't receive proof of payment within two hours, we will select another winner."
A typical VKontakte prize scam:
Never transfer money to anyone in advance. Don't believe what they tell you. If you want to please a person, pay for the delivery when you receive the package.
Sometimes they offer to pick up the prize in another city for free - this is a scam, because you will not go there. In addition, the address indicated is the registration address from the passport that the scammer passes off as his own. Even if you go there, at best you will find an unsuspecting person whose passport photo has gone for a walk on the Internet. In general, scammers persuade you to transfer money for "delivery".
In groups and on the pages of scammers, there are often photos of the lucky ones who won prizes and their reviews. In fact, the photos are collected from the Internet or from other fraudulent groups, and the reviews are faked. If the group says "Verified Group"- this is the same as if you write on the fence "Checked Fence"
There are statements like "This draw has ended. full check by the Administration of the largest group I will give away for free and has full confidence in the host of the competition " or "This competition is checked by law enforcement agencies"- it's just verbal diarrhea to lull your vigilance.
Also, scammers often post as if your photos, a photo of the prize against the background of your page, a photo of your passport, certificates of TIN, OGRNIP and others “as a guarantee”. But you don't know who is actually sitting there. There might be a convict in prison running dozens of "competitions" at the same time, or there might be a little girl just learning how to cheat. And the documents may have been circulating on the Internet for many years. The passport that they show you is not the passport of a scammer! A photo of a person is also not a photo of a scammer! These are documents and photos of completely strangers, often deceived, who were asked to send all this “for getting a job.” Having taken possession of copies of documents, fraudsters create pages on behalf of real people, and they do not even know about it. Making a fake page is a matter of five minutes.
When you see a photo of prizes on the background of a screen with open page scammer VKontakte, most often the photo of the page is “pasted” there in Photoshop. Look - two identical pictures, and on the screen different pages scammers:
But even if a scammer took a picture of an iPhone specifically for you, you won’t have any chances.
How to turn on my head and make sure that I am being swindled for money?
Here are some additional signs that will help you recognize a scammer:
- The page was created recently (look at the date of the first uploaded photo). But some work from old pages.
- Comments on photos, comments on the wall are closed. You can't then write on his page "Return my money."
- Look at the person's friends and what cities they are from. Feel free to ask one of them if they know this person (although you may come across fake friends).
- Ask other people who reposted - they also wrote that they are winners?
- Advanced method: do an image search on the scammer's page in Google or Yandex - you will find some of them in other places on the Internet. And pictures of prizes, and passports, and joyful "winners".
Use logic and common sense. Look, here is a person who writes that he will give away an iPhone for free to a random person because he bought a new one. Would anyone do that? He would sell it on an ad on the Internet or give it to a relative, but to give it to no one knows who, and even send it by mail? What for?
Or, for example, in a group they write: “Today our group turns 5 years old, on this occasion we are organizing a big draw Apple products— 32 winners!” Believe me, they don't have money for one iPhone. Groups and publics most often earn very little. Most likely, this is some poor student who has nothing to pay on the loan and he decided to heat the suckers on the Internet.
It happens that “recycling of old iPhones from a warehouse” is announced. Why would anyone give away iPhones from a warehouse, even old ones? They are worth the money anyway.
After all, think about it: if someone is giving away an expensive phone or several phones, does he not have a relatively small amount of money to pay for shipping, insurance or something else?
The instruction you are reading now is read by 4,000 to 7,000 people every month. Are so many iPhones and iPads given away for free every month? And these are only those who thought of looking on the Internet whether it is worth sending money to scammers! Well, or at least what to do when already sent.
Conclusion: don't be naive and don't send your money to sly people. You won't see them (and neither will your "prize" anyway).
One of the victims:
Some group wrote to me on Instagram from Moscow that I won an iPhone 7, at first I had doubts, but I often participated in such draws, once I really won a handbag, and therefore I believed this group. For confidence, they sent a passport and some kind of tax document. They wrote to me that for the delivery the total amount is 2000 rubles. And express delivery courier within 3-6 days. I paid in Qiwi wallet. Then yesterday they said, another 1500 rubles for the courier, I paid more, but the number was different. So they cheated and I gave them 3500 rubles. Blocked on Instagram. What can I do to get my money back? Help...
I allegedly won an iPhone. They asked to pay 2100 rubles for the flight. Sent. A day later they said that there was some kind of trouble at the customs and 900 rubles were still needed. I refused to send, referring to the lack of money. They said they'd think of something. Today, on the 3rd day, I went out and contacted them again. They said that I will receive everything, but with a delay. And now I see that the page and the group are blocked. The money was transferred to the Tinkov card.
I fell for a scam today too. Sent her money. And now I'm waiting for the iPhone. After that, she deleted the page. She wrote that I allegedly won an iPhone in honor of my birthday. It seemed strange at once, but I fell for it. It happens ... I would not want anyone else to fall for her tricks and those like her. I would like to punish her in some way...
And so on ad infinitum.
What should I do if I have been scammed? Transferred money. Can a cheater be punished?
First, complain to the VKontakte administration on the deceiver's page and on his group, if there is one. How to do this is well described here: How to complain VKontakte (will open in a new window).
Secondly, it is theoretically possible to bring the fraudster to justice, but practically it is difficult. You need to carefully collect evidence, consult a lawyer, go to the police or the prosecutor's office, waste time and money. Most likely, you were deceived for a small amount, but you will spend much more (and it is far from a fact that you will achieve something). Petty scammers are counting on that - that you will think it over and not go anywhere.
An important point: the last name, first name of the person on the page, his address, all the photographs and documents that you saw - all this has nothing to do with the scammer. These are documents and photographs of completely innocent people who somehow got on the Internet. The real swindler has a completely different name and lives in a completely different place. All you have is the number of the card or wallet where you sent the money (and it can be some left-handed person who simply cashes money for scammers).
Advice: just be smarter next time, and if you are aiming to punish the deceiver at any cost, start with a consultation with a lawyer or go to your district police officer.
And again today, a review of another promotion from a scammer already familiar to me, who, precisely on such promotions, is scamming people for money. this is a scam, deceiving people, cheating them for money and fraud. And this verdict is 100% guaranteed. The scammer tells me that I have a chance to win from 50$ to 3000$. Why such grace? Everything is very simple. Turns out I was one of the first users to get the update. Google browser Chrome up to version 66. There was no browser update. Everything here is false. The scammer even came up with a certificate of updating my browser. So, this is complete nonsense. In order to make sure of this, I read the user agreement that the scammer placed on the site so that it is difficult to find. So here is an interesting explanation of what is in front of me. See original. “The consent of the user to the provisions of this agreement is a prerequisite for starting to use the product. A product is a business quest - a game, hereinafter referred to as a “product”. The goal is to complete all levels and get a gift at the end. Starting to use the product, namely, clicking on the button "LEARN THE WIN AMOUNT" confirms the user's accession to this agreement" . This suggests that the scammer does not pay anyone money and that I got into an ordinary game where I have to pay. I think that this is confirmation that I see in front of me not a site from Google, but an ordinary fraudulent site, which was created in order to swindle people for money.
I do not advise you to read reviews. All of them are written by the author, but as you can see from them, the author does not suffer from eloquence. All reviews are written from the lantern, only in order to give more importance to this site. People not only didn’t write these reviews, but they didn’t even see them, like the site itself. Therefore, all the reviews are fake and they are not even worth looking at.
Not remember that scammers are on the alert and often change addresses websites and company names. Therefore, remember the characters and cabinets, so that later, all this can be determined. The main care.
The scammer hid the date of registration of the domain, as well as all the data about himself, but the registration was carried out on a private person and it was under this scam. The site is registered on IP Pool hosting for Iliad-Entreprises Business Hosting Customers – France, Paris at IP address 62.210.78.90 . Fraudsters have already learned how to register everything through VPN servers and it is almost impossible to trace the place of registration. But the search says more about this, and the site appeared in the search exactly 04/28/2018 and it was on this day that he was put up for sale on the service e-pay.club. This is his date of birth, which suggests that this is a one-page scam site and he does not pay anyone money.
And so, there is no registration on the site. They tell me that my certificate is being verified and less than 30 seconds have passed, and the scammer is already congratulating me and informing me that I won 2,195 virtual dollars . Nobody pays this money, but I will try to withdraw it. Then the scammer connects an allegedly online operator who prints something. This is all homemade by the author and everyone will have exactly the same text and exactly the same amount of winnings. Now I am offered to fill in the details of my card. And now I will not do this. Instead of my card details, I enter 2 digits 1, and everything goes through. But here a message pops up that my bank rejected the transfer in dollars and I must now convert dollars into rubles. The cost of such a conversion is 162 rubles.. The scheme is standard and it is used by all scammers. I try to pay for this conversion and get on payment system service e-pay.club, where he must pay directly to the scammer's account. And this is only the beginning of a divorce, since there will still be a lot of payments in this scam and you will see them all.
Action from the browser Google Chrome invented, created and actively sold on the service by a fraudster who works here under a pseudonym luxtorg. He has already been included in my reviews and you can watch his latest work right now. He has all the scams of exactly the same subject, namely, a divorce precisely on the topic of various actions that do not exist.
The scam is only the fourth day, and it has already been visited 16670 people and 509 people believed in all these tales, simply by voluntarily giving to a scammer 139 635 rubles. We have a lot of people who want to get what they have not earned, and it is on this that the scammer catches his goldfish, enriching himself at the expense of these people. As you know very well, free cheese is only in a mousetrap and many people forget about this truth, and a scammer uses it full program. After paying the first payment, no one will see any money. The scammer has everything provided for, and then he will have to pay 11 more times for various non-existent services. These services will constantly appear when you try to withdraw money. And so, you will have to pay for the following services: Activation of a transit account - 450 rubles, Registration of winnings - 710 rubles, Connection of a secure communication line - 990 rubles, Registration of insurance - 690 rubles, Verification of transfer data - 430 rubles, Registration of a digital signature - 850 rubles, Activation digital signature - 640 rubles, Service "Instant transfer of funds" -1290 rubles, Coordination of the transfer with the security service - 975 rubles, Service "Transfer of funds in two parts" -1250 rubles. But even having paid all this nonsense, you will not receive money, since the scammer does not pay them to anyone on this site. Here everything is set up for his earnings, and this earnings are calculated on simple human greed. But you yourself have already seen that this is a simple game. And the scammer is precisely playing cat and mouse with you, trying to get as much as possible from suckers more money. All this is perfectly visible in the screenshots.
Conclusions. Promotion from Google Chrome browser this is a scam, deceiving people, cheating them for money and fraud. This is a game and here no one pays money to anyone. Therefore, you cannot even start paying here, as this is the path to the abyss. You will simply give money to a scammer without receiving anything from him in return. Almost all scams are a game of a scammer, where it is people who act as Pinocchio, who buried five gold coins and is waiting for the money tree to grow. Yes, it will never grow, and this, you know very well. In the same way, you will not receive any money on such sites, since they are not and cannot be on these sites. These sites are fraudulent and they are created solely to scam people for money. Therefore, always think before making payments on such scams.
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