Bitdefender Labs Detect Fraud With Alleged Pfizer Corona Vaccination Survey. Investigating personal and account information and fraud. 23,36% of the attacks with an apparently German source.
With the alleged sender Pfizer and under the pretext of conducting surveys on the subject of corona vaccines, fraudsters have stolen personal data and possibly money from more than 200.000 consumers since April. This is shown by data from Bitdefender telemetry.
Worldwide spam campaign
According to the Bitdefender analysis, the spammers rolled out the email campaign in a targeted manner in different regions. 69,98% of the users contacted are in the USA, 12,39% in Ireland, 3,40% in Sweden, 3,23% in Denmark, 2,92% in South Korea, 1,28% in Great Britain and 1,15, 49,75% in Germany. Most of the attacks come from the Netherlands (25,08%). But according to the IP sender address, many of the emails originate in the USA (23,36%) and Germany (XNUMX%).
Congratulations! You can get a $ 50 eBay gift card!
The scammers asked participants in the supposed survey to give their opinion about the Pfizer vaccine. Recipients who click the "START SURVEY NOW" button are redirected to a questionable URL that immediately loads a captcha. Goods vouchers worth up to 100 US dollars are available as a possible incentive. In addition, the fraudulent senders promise a gift for which only a shipping fee is due. To do this, however, the tricksters needed the participant's credit card or bank account number.
Stay away from surveys asking for account information
It is not easy for outsiders to spot a fake survey right away. If the survey requires you to fill out the questions within a certain period of time in order to receive the voucher, you should be suspicious. Serious senders do not set any deadlines. Even more so, they do not ask for credit card or bank account numbers.
Bitdefender Labs have already uncovered fraud campaigns with alleged surveys and gifts on several occasions. In order to get the personal information and the money of the recipients, the thieves often camouflaged themselves with well-known brand names such as Lowes, eBay, SamsClub or IKEA:
- Congratulations! You can get a $ 50 eBay gift card!
- Congratulations! You can get a $ 50 Lowes gift card!
- Congratulations! You can get a $ 50 Coke gift card!
- Congratulations! You can get a $ 50 Ikea gift card!
- Congratulations! You can get a $ 50 SamsClub gift card!
- Congratulations! You can get a $ 50 CVS gift card!
- Congratulations! You can get a $ 50 Verizon gift card!
As long as the corona vaccination campaign is ongoing, con artists will most likely continue to try to lure consumers with fake surveys from Pfizer and perhaps other vaccine manufacturers.
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