Earlier today, I received an email asking me to claim money for using Emirates Skywards Airlines. So I believe this is a Middle Eastern airline that services Nigeria, and I was surprised to receive an email asking me to claim a certain amount of money.
The amount they asked me to claim was 504.49 AED. I first converted the conversation to USD, and it was around 137$.
At this point, the money did not appear to be alarming enough to be considered a scam.
Perhaps if they would offered me $2,000, my brain would start screaming "scam," but I have not even flown out of the country yet, so how come? Perhaps I was lucky to fly out and did not remember? No, it can not be; my brains are still functional.
Oh, maybe I entered an airline contest using my email.
Eureka!
Of course, this had to be it, so I checked my email to see if I had previously interacted with any airlines; surprisingly, nothing came up.
This was my primary email, and I rarely used it. I use my other two emails for crypto interactions and other things, but I save my main email for things that are absolutely necessary so that it is not compromised.
I mean, it is been 14 years, if not more, and I would like to keep it, perhaps passing it down to my son/daughter as an inheritance. So, how did I receive such an email in my primary email account? Anyway, leave bygones alone.
Then I checked the email's original sender to see who sent it; perhaps it was from a credible source, such as the company's official email account, but nope!
The email account appears to be a bot account owned by a fraud prince, with hundreds, if not thousands, of people receiving these types of emails.
There was a CLAIM button below, which was where you were supposed to claim and collect your money.
Now, that claim button could contain a virus, a specific command to access your crypto wallets or bank account information, or it could prompt you to enter some information, which is then used to hack or compromise you.
I know this because I once texted my bank's official Twitter handle to complain about a wrong transaction, and I received a response from another verified account with nearly the same name as my bank's.
It asked me to fill out a form with my information; at first, I assumed it was the official account, but my spidey sense was like, "wait a minute!" I survive that one.
So anything could be in the claim button. So, when I clicked to see if I could block the email account, I discovered that I was subscribed to it.
How did I end up subscribed to it?
Then I remembered that there is a black market for people who buy original email accounts and convert them into scams, particularly for people who have previously interacted with the email.
For example, scammers go looking for real web2 social media accounts because they know they can use them to make their scam more intentional.
I was rational enough to look, because I have reached the point where nothing moves me anymore. I am not greedy enough to reap where I have not sown, and I will not claim money where I have not previously interacted.
However, scams are designed to exploit your emotional intelligence, and sometimes people fail not because they are greedy, but simply because they are not cautious enough. These guys even put a "..... claim before....." Date to createFOMO
Scammers plays guess games and ends up lucky sometimes
However, if I had used this airline or had flown to a Middle Eastern country, I might simply click the link. The sender must have thought, "Let us send to 10,000 people; at least 200 will click and we will win.
It is intriguing because I have seen far better attempts to scam me in the past, and I have not fallen for any of them. I know that these hacks and scams are becoming more common in crypto and perhaps one day, out of excitement, I will fall for one of them.
My trustwallet, Bybit, and Binance accounts are all empty anyway, with the exception of metamask, where I have less than $10 to interact with various crypto projects. But I am still standing strong and hoping that day does not come.
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