People, be vigilant!

I confess, from time to time I buy tickets on the Stoloto website. Accordingly, letters from the system come to the mail every now and then: checks, messages about winnings (very small, but I hope that they are still small), notifications about circulations with special conditions, and so on. The mail service already recognizes them, does not throw them into spam, marks them as “important”.

And the other day, once again looking at the mail, I found a letter there. In the column “sender” it stood, “Stoloto”. But here’s the subject of the letter looked somehow strange: “Welcome to ****@****.** entrent nouvelle garçon mais n72c”. A mixture of English and French, “Welcome [имейл] come in new but n72c…”

And inside was a message. Your email address won some kind of promotion, and you were entitled to one free ticket. Use it for 12 hours, press the button, the win is guaranteed. Well, almost: 70 percent probability.

Everything seems to be clean. And the mail service recognized the letter as sent by Stoloto. And there is a logo. However, there are worrying signs.

First, it’s a terrible mixture of European languages ​​in the title, apparently randomly generated.

Secondly, the sender’s address: [email protected]. Stoloto has its own mail domain, and letters come from it.

And thirdly, the link itself, which is called to click. Let me remind you that if you hover your mouse over the link, but below you can see it. Moreover, there are cases when the link is disguised: it looks like a button, picture, text. But below we will still see her in her present form.

So, at the bottom there was a large set of letters in which the words script and macros stood out. It was quite clear that the link led to some page with incomprehensible scripts.

I was not too lazy to write to Stoloto and attached a screenshot of the letter. And got this response:

“Yana,

Thank you for your vigilance and feedback. This information is very important to us, as we are constantly working to monitor, block and prevent fraud under the guise of government lotteries.

“Stoloto” has nothing to do with what happened. Unfortunately, scammers are increasingly taking advantage of the growing popularity of lotteries. They disguise their illegal activities as lotteries. We constantly warn our members about this.

<…..>

Always be careful. Remember that you can buy lottery tickets and get a prize only on the official website of Stoloto stoloto.ru. Carefully check the name of the site and do not provide details of a bank card or electronic wallet on suspicious resources.

We wish you good luck and future victories.”

Well, we also wish our readers good luck, be vigilant and observe digital hygiene in our difficult time of cyber scammers.

Yana MAYEVSKAYA.