Did you get mail from the Yahoo! Awards Center? I hate to break it to you, but the mail is fake. It’s a typical scam, sent to thousands of people in order to try to steal their money, their identity or just pick petty change from them by making them answer, and thereby confirm their e-mail address. If you have any doubt whatsoever that this is a scam, stop just for a second and think of why Yahoo! would use an email address from their competitor Google’s online email service GMail.

Here’s my copy, if you got one like these, or even remotely like these it’s an iScam. Just throw it away and try to forget about it.

from    Yahoo Award Center <awardcenterr@gmail.com>
reply-to    awardcenterr@gmail.com
to    undisclosed-recipients
date    Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 10:56 PM
subject    *****SPAM***** YAHOO AWARD *****WINNING NOTIFICATION*****Reply

YAHOO AWARDS CENTER
124 Stockport Road, Longsight,
Manchester M60 2DB-United Kingdom.

This is to inform you that you have won a prize money of One Million Great Britian pounds (GBP1,000,000.00) for the first quarter 2008 prize promotion which is organised by YAHOO AWARDS &WINDOWS LIVE.

YAHOO collects all the email addresses of the people that are active  online, among the millions that subscribed to Yahoo and Hotmail and few  from other email providers. Six people are selected monthly to benefit from this promotion and you are of the Select Winners. Winners shall be paid in accordance with their Settlement Centers.

Yahoo Prize Award must be claimed not later that 30days from date of Draw  Notification. Any prize not claimed within this period will be forfeited and returned to it source as unclaimed. Stateed below are your identification numbers.

BATCH NUMBER: MFI/06/APA-43658 REFERENCE NUMBER: 2007234522 PIN: 1207
You are requested to contact our co-ordinator in Manchester and send your winning identification numbers to him. You are advise only to contact the Co-ordinator’s on the email below

Email: awardcenterr@gmail.com
Name: Rev Paul jeddy

You are advise only to contact on the email above (awardcenterr@gmail.com)

You are advised to send the following information to our co-ordinator to facilitate the release of your fund to you

Full name, country, contact address, telephone number, fax number,marital status, occupation, sex, date of birth.

Your in Service
Mrs Mary Harmon

It’s a nice detail that Yahoo! would use a GMail address for correspondence. Thee

When US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! email accont was hacked the other day, it was done without any greater technical skills. All that the Anonymous hacker needed to do was to use Yahoo!’s password recovery feature and fill in the appropriate answers. The questions where all general ones - so general that they, in Sarah Palin’s case - where found in less than an hour using Wikipedia.

The hacker explains the simple the prosess:

after the password recovery was reenabled, it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)

the second was somewhat harder, the question was “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college, if youll look on some of the screenshits [sic] that I took and other fellow anon have so graciously put on photobucket you will see the google search for “palin eloped” or some such in one of the tabs.

I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower…

It wasn’t harder than that. Something to remember when you start communicating with scammers such as the ones who’s scam e-mails we publish here on Nikke´s Index. Ones you start feeding the scammers accurate information you open yourself for various other attacks on your person. A reason as good as any to just hit delete when you get an email that souds too good to be true.

Sources:

• wikileaks.org/wiki/VP_contender_Sarah_Palin_hacked
• www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/17/anonymous_hacks_sarah_palin/
• www.appscout.com/2008/09/hacking_sarah_palin_what_we_ca.php