NEWS
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Again Target Of Account Scam
There are dumb scammers and there are REALLY dumb scammers. This is a tale about the latter.
A friend of mine was just sent an e-mail by ‘Blizzard’ saying that she had been chosen to participate in the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Beta. All she needed to do to join was to log into her account where she would receive more information. Not being a gamer herself, she wouldn’t have known Cataclysm, let alone that it has been released, but that little fact was the first mistake of our ‘not the sharpest tool in the box’ scammers.
Interestingly, it gets worse fast. Unlike the scammers, my friend is a fairly smart cookie and she hovered over the login link to find out that the domain name didn’t even closely resemble the name from the sender (mistake 2). At this point she forwarded me the e-mail so I could take a peek at it myself.
I didn’t need any time to recognize the e-mail as a fake and remembered a similar scam about six months ago. Lo and behold, the scam is exactly the same as one first sighted in July. The e-mail even had a 2010 copyright (3). Blizzard is known for sending e-mails with beautiful designs and well-worded text and this e-mail had neither (4). Being familiar with these sort of scams and trusting my viral and firewall software setup, I decided to take a chance and check out what the scammers had in mind to convince their targets to actually attempt to log in. I clicked the link and FireFox immediately reported that the site was a reported fake site (5). Having a strong stomach, I clicked on regardless and found a page that vaguely resembled World of Warcraft’s login page (6), but was so broken that no one in their right mind would ever consider logging in (7).
There are numerous other holes to be found in all aspects of the scammers communication. I doubt anyone would ever fall for this scam, but let this post be a warning to the gullible and unaware.
(images of the fake site, the real site and the e-mail)