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Vodafone E-Topup Register

Receive a SPAM email, sign up, and get £50 phone credit! No, Don't! It's a HOAX and a SCAM!

You tell children not to accept sweets from strangers, and then what do you do? When you receive an e-mail like the one below, do you accept it and CLICK HERE, or do you exercise some commonsense and caution? ...

Well I can tell you right now, that message is not from Vodafone! for one thing, Vodafone can spell much better than that. "Its" should have an apostrophe in that context, and "benefits" is not spelt "benifits". Plus, there should be a full stop before the word "just".

However, even without examining the linguistic abilities of scamsters relative to those of Vodafone, you can still determine very easily that the message is a hoax. If you right-click on the click here, and copy the results into a text editor, you'll see the destination address is not what it should be. In the original spam message, instead of it being a valid Vodafone address, the address of the link was:

http;/online.vodafone.co.uk.dispatch.portal.appmanager.vodafone.loginservice.page.myvodafone.servicerequested.rg-ps.com/index.php?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=template04&pageID=PAV_0001

...which if you look closely is NOT www.vodafone.co.uk but www.vodafone.uk.something.something...etc and actually goes to rg-ps.com

I'd advise against visiting it, as I consider it's almost certainly a phishing operation!

Incidentally, the hoaxers who sent the message had about twenty images within the message remote-served from www.nancyshuford.com ! Don't blame Nancy; it's not her fault. The hoaxers have pinched her bandwidth by remote-serving the images, as per the eBay spam message. If anyone does that to your site, you can confound them by swiftly renaming the images and then all the recipients see things that say "this is a hoax!". After that, the spam senders aren't so likely to do it again to you.

Don't blame Vodafone; don't blame Nancy; and try not to blame yourself if you've been fooled into clicking on the link. There are various anti-spyware and antivirus resources here, and if you're victim to identity theft there are still things you can do to undo the damage. If the scamsters have got your personal Vodafone details, contact Vodafone for a start!