Friday, January 04, 2008

watch out: "new shopping new life" email scam

i still don't have a clue what this is.. seems like a trojan virus yet doesn't behave exactly like one. take a look at this discussion thread on CNET forums.

i received an email in my hotmail account, titled "new shopping new life" from a friend, dated 27 december 2007. i opened the email and found the content suspicious (no attachments, but it seemed as though my friend had forwarded an irrelevant spam mail to all her contacts).

(content abstract from email received):
Hello friend
We are an international trading company. There are most kinds of electronic products on our website, such as motorcycles, tv, notebooks, phones, psp, projectors, gps, dvd, dv, dc, mp3/4, musical instruments, toys, watches and so on. We can offer quality goods with reasonable price. When you have time, welcome to visit our website and contact us. Thanks.
Our website is: (( www.qmcying.com ))
Mail: ((qmcying@hotmail.com))
MSN: ((qmcying@hotmail.com))

so i replied to my friend and asked if she indeed sent that email...
and true enough, she didn't.

that prompted me to quickly run a google search, and found the CNET discussion thread above. some people are suggesting that this is a work of hackers, so for those of you who have received this email or have friends who have received it from you, do run a full-system scan on your computer, and change your email account password. some people (on the forum discussion) are even suggesting that the hackers could have accessed/stolen the email login details/password via 3rd-party communities such as blogger, facebook etc., because these sites offer direct access to personal email/messenger accounts via their home site (which means you probably would have provided confidential access details on those platforms).

anyone who has further information on this, please leave a comment.
thanks! :)

and last but not least...
HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I too received this email "from my daughter". I got it twice and deleted both times. A few weeks later my daughter changed her email address because of spam. A few MONTHS later, I see that all of my contacts have been sent this email when I received several mail delivery failure notices. It has been sent twice to people in my address book and now everytime I log into my email account, all of my contacts have disappeared! This whatever-it-is made it thru the email blocker and my McAfee protection! If anyone knows how to correct this please post!! Thanks

Anonymous said...

My Hotmail account also sent this email to all of my contacts and as the above said i had delivery failure notices - so identified that my account had sent it!!, i changed my password immediatly and sent a sorry email to all of my contacts, so thought this was the end of it, but today i log in to hotmail and all of my contacts have disappeared also! so looks like i still have a problem nightmare. what is happening and how do i stop it?

Unknown said...

This message was sent from my yahoo account today to everyone in my contacts! My contacts are not erased as well. I ran symantec, and nothing came up.

Allisonbct@yahoo.com

Anonymous said...

The only site my mom has been on lately is Geni. Shortly thereafter the mass email went out. Her Geni password is the same as her Hotmail password.

Than said...

I had the same thing happen. I got that weird email a few weeks ago in my yahoo account, and then only today the spam went out to my contact list. It seems the incidents are sparked by receiving the email, so I'm thinking probably not a third-party service, although I have used Meebo and Agile Messenger clients to log into my yahoo Instant Messenger. Nothing else has had access to my password. Since we have in common the fact of receiving the email first, then I am thinking that is how it gets passed on. Quite annoying though, isn't it?