Scammers Heading to the Olympics

The XXII Winter Olympic Games officially get under way on 7 February. Of course, this major sporting event has not gone unnoticed by the spammers. The “Nigerian” scammers couldn’t resist either: at the end of January we received an interesting mailing from someone looking for a trustworthy person in Russia who they could transfer 850,000 euros to. To explain such an unusual request, the author didn’t use the standard “Nigerian” tales, but instead cited a trip to the Olympic Games – the money was needed for a group of six people who supposedly intended to stay in Sochi. For further information, the recipient of this generous offer had to contact the sender.

A seemingly harmless request for help in organizing a trip turns out to be a trap, with the usual large sum of money as the bait. A reference to a real event is used to persuade the recipient that the request is genuine. But the result is always the same – the spammer asks the recipient to transfer a certain amount of money, for instance, to cover the costs of the transfer, and after that the fraudster vanishes without a trace.