Hedzup to science, education, human rights and legal academics and advocates: there is new email scam that targets you.

The con? You receive a very slick-looking invitation email to attend a conference at a hotel in London whose focus matches perfectly with your field of study or profession. The email’s embedded links go to a multiply-layered website that touts the conference’s sessions, details, with a further invitation to present your work. Intriguing?

Don’t bite.

The hotels involved either do NOT exist or the hotels themselves have no record of any such conference, despite the glossy invites’ blather.

The spam goal? Phishing! To get you to pay $$ to attend.

Examine and trace the email’s header data and reverse-IP-research the sender. Check the sender’s IP addresses at ProjectHoneyPot.org and/or DShield.org. Flag them as spam in your respective mail applications or notify your web administrator, if you received such an email at work. AND do forward the email with header data to the Federal Trade Commission’s spam investigative unit, at spam@uce.gov

Associates within the job-hunt networking site, LinkedIn, alerted members to this scam; I read about it last night and was compelled to share this more widely.  One group member had received an email promoting an exciting-sounding climate change conference, “CCWT11,’  his field of expertise.  An example of this con:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_AsaYffComEJ:eclimate.blogspot.com/2011/07/ccwt11-conference-invitation.html+%22ccwt11%22+%2B+london&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com

Solution:

Check the security ‘watchdog’ site, ProjectHoneyPot.org . In this specific case of a bogus climate change conference named “CWT11,” Project Honey Pot has flagged 18 different IP addresses, so far, that are known to be generating this specific  scam. Google ‘projecthoneypot.org’ + ‘CCWT11’ . If you don’t already know about these web watchdog services, check it out. DShield.org is another great reporting and analysis site for web scams and virus activities.

Others from this LinkedIn group from around the world also reported receiving similarly “Ooh, I’ve got to attend this” -sounding emails whose originator appeared to be the United Nations… UNESCO.. The essential texts of the emails are the same, but each is one is specifically tailored to tempt professionals and academics in science, education and the law. As one group member stated,

“A middle school  principal in New York  received an invitation from the United Nations to attend an educational conference which was also supposed to be held in a London hotel. She forwarded the email to me asking for my opinion. The hotel existed, but when I checked the hotel’s calender of events, the conference did not exist. That’s how I was able to confirm that it was a scam. Two months later, another friend — a judge working in Kuwait on human rights issues — forwarded similar email to me again for my opinion.

The two emails were identical except that the title of the conference was tailored to the field of the recipient (the second email was about a conference related to human rights). These are ‘educated’ scam emails. It looks like they gather some information about the person first so that they can make the conference appealing to her/him. I know others (who) have received emails from UNESCO as well for conferences in Paris!!”

As another in this group attested, “Beware, my friends! But stay in the game.”

Trying to be a good Netizen! Thank you, fellow Firedogs.

/bleuz00m