Germans Won the Lottery, Deutsche Bank Group and Santa Lucia Assurance Company Tell Clients

Phishing campaigns made a strong comeback this year, enabling crooks to steal Germans` personal information by issuing officially-looking lottery win notifications allegedly from Deutsche Bank and Santa Lucia Assurance Company.

Despite restless efforts of media and the security community, spammers continue to poke around for unwary users ready to give away their private data in return for empty promises. This time crooks are impersonating Deutsche Bank Group and Santa Lucia Assurance Company to send people e-mails telling them about a (bogus) lottery win.

Germans eager to pick up their prize need to deliver the sender their full name, address, phone number, age occupation, company name and nearest international airport in the city of residence either by simply sending this data in a reply message or by filling in the attached form delivered by the notification message.

or attached form

The message from the Deutsche Bank appears as being sent by the Remittance Manager Central Portal of Deutsche Bank Group London UK. The bank representative invites the beneficiary “to stop dealing with some non-officials in the bank as this is an illegal act and will have to stop if you so wish to receive your payment immediately” and use the bank service SWIFT CARD PAYMENT CENTRE to withdraw the money from any ATM machine in any part of the world, but not more than 15,000 US dollars per working day.

The moment the user fills in the form and sends the requested sensitive information scammers receive on a silver platter the user`s identity and access to his bank account to use them either for impersonations or for unauthorized money-muling-type transactions with stolen money obtained from various illegal operations.

Bitdefender blocks the spam e-mails and phishing websites, so users who have the antivirus solution installed are protected. The company advises users to keep their software updated, including their antivirus.

This article is based on the spam samples provided courtesy of Ionut-Daniel RAILEANU, Bitdefender Anti-spam Analyst

All product and company names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and are the property of, and may be trademarks of, their respective owners.