I Just Won 1,575,000 Pounds!

Amazing! I just got the news that I had won in a Nokia Promo draw. Nevermind that I don’t remember exactly what draw it was. I sign-up for so many things that I don’t remember all of them anyway. The news came in a SMS message, and told me that I had won 1,575,000 Pounds! I would have already been very happy had it been in Singapore Dollars, but hey, 1,575,000 Pounds works out to be over S$4 million!

Yeah, dream on. Scammers are moving on from email to phone messages. It’s just like spam. Whatever happens with snail mail can happen with email. Then from email, why not SMS messages too. I wonder how many people would fall for the scam.

I thought about researching this scam a little. Interestingly, nothing came up on Google for the phone number, both email addresses, or the sum of money. But there are a number forum postings of similar Nokia lucky draw scams.

Then I found a very strange thing while trying to check who eim.ae is registered to. The WHOIS server whois.uaenic.ae, which is supposed to supply information for eim.ae, was inaccessible. The whois client reported “Unable to connect to remote host”! But anyway, eim.ae appears to belong to the Emirates Telecommunications Corporation. Uaenic.ae seems to be the accredited registrar for the .ae top level domain. How odd that they can’t keep their WHOIS server running properly.

Okay, back to reality… there is no 1,575,000 Pounds.