The Hook Line’s a Stinker

The e-mail looks enticing. Right there in the subject field are the words: “Wal*Mart 1,000 Dollar Gift Card Inside.” The only message is a URL link.

Another e-mail, this one from walmart@survey.com, promises to reward the recipient with $150 for completing a short survey. Neither is legitimate.

A host of familiar corporate names are used in what prove to be fraud, scamming, spoofing and phishing expeditions perpetrated by potential identity thieves.

“Wal-Mart would never do something like this,” spokeswoman Anna Taylor says, referring to the survey e-mail. “We don’t do consumer research like this.” While she hadn’t heard about this particular ruse, Taylor was aware that Wal-Mart’s name has been used in other scams.

Survey.com is a legitimate research outfit located in San Jose, Calif.: its website notes that the company “provides dedicated customer support to fulfill all your research needs.”

“We’ve never done anything like that,” Michael Bach, founder and chief executive of Survey.com, says upon being told of the bogus e-mail solicitation using his company’s domain as a return address for a purported Wal-Mart survey. “It’s not something we’ve ever been involved with.”

Because of the confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements his company signs with current and former clients, Bach could not say whether Survey.com has worked with Wal-Mart. He did say, however, that “even a company as big as Wal-Mart” wouldn’t pay $150 for a minute or so of the consumer’s time.

“Even Wal-Mart couldn’t pay for incentivation like that,” he says. “The size of the incentive should have been a tip-off.”

Bach himself has received e-mails purporting to be from eBay and PayPal that were not legitimate, and his company has received telephone calls and e-mails from people seeking payment for participating in surveys.

Seasonal spamming
“When they provided us with details, we had to tell them that, unfortunately, it was not one of ours. It was a phony survey,” Bach says. It’s unfortunate, he says, but “sometimes people are not as aware as they should be. They should be more leery.”

Spam volume rises in the winter months because “at this time of year there is an increase in legitimate e-mail holiday offers,” says Dermot Harnett, an anti-spam expert with Symantec. He estimates that “76.4 percent of all e-mail messages are spam.”

In the e-mail that offered the $1,000 Wal-Mart gift card, one recipient was reluctant to use the link embedded in the message, feeling that there could have been a virus or some other malware involved. When it was eventually tested, a dialog box indicated that the page could not be found. A subsequent check found that the URL, livelongandbestrong.com, is on several lists of expired and deleted domain names.

Fraud tip-offs
The caution was not ill-taken, however, as the message had a few clues as to its veracity. The subject line message raises eyebrows because the word “dollar” is spelled out – an indication that the dollar sign may not have been available on the foreign keyboard used to type the message, and/or the writer was unfamiliar with inserting symbols.

Consumer watchdogs and law enforcement authorities are aware of the scams; several websites warn consumers about the use of Wal-Mart’s name in online scams.