Beware of 419 Phishing Scam Spoofing iKobo.com - Fraud Alert
Beware of a new scam that is using the iKobo.com’s name to try and get your personal information. iKobo is a “person to person” money transfer agent or payment processor much like Paypal and they do not send unsolicited emails such as this one asking for you to send information back to them.
Here’s a copy of the phishing email…
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Our Ref: IKG/NGN/ICO Your Ref: Dear Beneficiary, iKobo is a company that specializes in money transfers. With them, you send money to the any countries with your MasterCard or Visa. The recipient gets your transfer put onto a secured Visa debit card which can be used worldwide at ATM locations for cash withdrawals. This debit card, which is reusable, is shipped to the recipient first. As part of our commitment in bringing our services to the world to the world, I wish to announce to you that your email emerged as one of the luck winners to receive a grant of 2.8 Million US Dollars. This fund would be made available to you through your an iKobo Visa card. Your Personal identification Number is 2222. We have concluded plans to deliver this card to your as soon as possible. FULL NAME: We look forward to hearing from you soon. |
Chances are, if you send the minimal required information, these scammers will have somebody contact you and ask for further information or possibly for you to make a deposit in order to claim the supposed grant of 2.8 Million. This is a classic scam where the con artists will try to win your trust until they can get what they want from you.
There are several clues to this email being a scam located in the email headers. To begin with, the email was relayed through a hosting account on siteground.com for the domain wshf.org using the email client “SquirrelMail/1.4.13″ and email account (nochumson@wshf.org) which is possibly forging the email address of somebody named Howard Nochumson, who is listed as the administrative contact for the “Washington Square Health Foundation”, the legit owner of the wshf.org domain. The IP the email originated from (80.255.62.236) seems to have quite a history of spamming and appears to be some sort of satellite service operated by Intelsat Global Service Corporation (intelsat.com) who has a Washington, DC address in their contact information, yet is listing an Atlanta, Georgia (404) area code in their abuse contact information.
Nowhere is there any record of the email being sent from, nor relayed through iKobo’s mail servers, although it is quite strange this type 419 Phishing scheme is usually routed through Nigeria, it’s odd to see all the corresponding IP’s pointing to US locations only.
Nevertheless, do not ever respond to emails such as this which claim you have won a large sum of money and the decision as based on your email address selection alone. These type of emails are always 100% guaranteed scams.



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