Beware of lottery tricks on social networks

(Baonghean) - Recently, on social networks, many people have received messages claiming to have won prizes worth hundreds of millions of dong. According to the information provided, these are scams that take advantage of people's gullibility and greed to take over accounts and defraud people of their money.

One day at the end of March, Ms. Hoang Thi Ng, residing in Block 12, Ben Thuy Ward (Vinh City), received a text message on her phone with the following content: “Congratulations, your Messenger account has been lucky enough to win the first prize from the Facebook customer appreciation program. The prize you received in the random draw from the system is a Liberty 150cc motorbike and a gift voucher worth 70 million VND.”

Not participating in any contest, now receiving the notification of a "huge" gift, curious, Ms. Ng tried to access the website: tuanlocvang2015.vn according to the instructions. The website is designed very eye-catching, with the title "Messenger Customer Appreciation Event 2015. Congratulations on your luck in the random spin of the account system with the prize code DH6979 winning the first prize". The website also posted an image of the certificate "website meets intellectual property standards" with "system that has passed the prestige - quality - efficiency inspection" issued by "Central Intellectual Property Association of Vietnam". Signed by: Deputy Editor-in-Chief Hoang Luong (!?). The website owner even posted images of some customers who won the prize and received gifts from the sponsor. Finally, these websites all require the winner to declare personal information to make a file to receive the prize.

Photo taken from website: tuanlocvang2015.vn.

Suspicious, Ms. Ng reported the information to Nghe An Newspaper reporter. When the reporter (PV) tried to access the above website, she also received a prize code with a notification with the winning content after filling in all the required information such as date of birth, ID card number, email address, phone number, bank account... Less than 2 seconds later, the reporter received a notification from the web administrator with the content: "Congratulations on being the owner of the First Prize: 1 LIBERTY 150CC IE motorbike worth 67,500,000 VND and 1 gift voucher worth 100,000,000 VND (with 1 free gas card for 1 year worth 5,000,000 VND). The total prize value is 172.5 million VND".

However, this is only a temporary profile, so it is necessary to proceed with the original profile procedure to receive the prize. To receive the prize, the website owner requires payment of the original profile fee of 1.5 million VND. The payment method for the original profile is to buy a phone card, totaling 1,250,000 VND. Continuing to create another account, the reporter still received a congratulatory confirmation with the same content as the previous Nguyen Tien Tung account. It seems that all the scams have been pre-programmed. This is proof for customers using Facebook to be wary of scams.

Not only Ms. Ng. but many Facebook users also received many messages and shares from people who were friends on their wall about their lucky winnings.

In early March, Ms. TTH in Hung Thinh commune (Hung Nguyen) also received a share from her friends on her personal facebook page about her winning a prize. Ms. H showed us a sample message, specifically as follows: Congratulations on your facebook account being lucky to win the "First prize" from the "Golden Week of Customer Appreciation" program in the second quarter. Your prize is a LYBERTY S150 motorbike and a gift voucher worth 100 million VND. Please visit the website Http://SuKienMangXaHoiVn.Com or click on http://goo.gl/oJGdFa to register your profile to receive the prize. For any questions, please contact the hotline 00841684777729 Admin Thanh for support and advice. To gain the trust of the facebook owner, the website also said that this is a program sponsored by the PIAGGO motorbike company and the Facebook Vietnam application to promote the PIAGGO brand to consumers.

Thinking that she had won a valuable prize, Ms. H immediately followed the instructions in the message and accessed the website to log in her personal information. However, after registering all her information, Ms. H was no longer able to access her Facebook account. After that, her friends in her Facebook contacts received similar winning messages as her and they continued to become new victims of this extremely sophisticated form of fraud.

In fact, after accessing the website Sukienmangxahoi.vn to register personal information and wait for the prize, countless images of motorbikes, stacks of cash and other expensive household items caught the viewer's eye. The reporter tried to access the website with the above address but was informed that there was a connection error. Calling the phone number posted on the website was not possible.

Responding to the media, the media representatives of Piaggio Company and Facebook in Vietnam said that these units absolutely do not have any such sponsorship program, nor do any of Piaggio's partners implement this program. This means that the information related to the program "Thank you for using Facebook" is not true and it is just a scam to take over accounts and cheat customers' money.

According to the investigation, this scam will first try to steal a user's Facebook account through common online scams. Once they have this account, the bad guys will change the user's photo to the Facebook logo icon, and change the account name to "Facebook Security". In addition to pretending to be an official account belonging to Facebook Company, the bad guys also chat with everyone on the stolen account's friend list, posting a malicious link.

Not only the above 2 websites, there are also pages such as http://Traogiaimessenger2015.com; mangxahoi2015.com, hethongmessenger2015.com, giaifacebook.com... that are also "luring" recipients to register to receive rewards for the purpose of fraud. Currently, this extremely sophisticated form of fraud using technology is still taking place, not all victims of this form of fraud want to notify the authorities because of the concept that if they lose their account, they can create a new account, but many people do not know that when providing such personal information, they are very vulnerable to being exploited by bad guys who can continue to commit fraud on many other victims. Along with the rapid development of information technology, personal information is becoming more and more vulnerable to exploitation, dissemination, and misuse. Therefore, protecting personal information is very important, it is also considered one of the basic human rights.

It can be affirmed that the police have just cracked down on a number of scams under the name of "Uncle Viettel", the network operators have also tightened the spam message problem, the bad guys will switch to scams on social networks - which are very lax in identifying users. And above all, the people who are using social network accounts should show that they are sober, not because of greed that they are taken advantage of by scammers.

Article and photos:Nguyen Hung