‘United Nations’ Advance Fee Scam Uses Skype

The message is not from the United Nations. It is an advance fee scam designed to trick people into sending their money and personal information to cybercriminals.

According to this Skype message, you are the lucky winner of $50,000 courtesy of the United Nations. Supposedly, your Skype name was selected as the winner of the prize as part of the ongoing ‘United Nations Poverty Eradication Program’.

To claim your prize, you are instructed to contact the United Nations via an email address in the message. The message includes a ‘secret code number’ for you to use during the claim process.

You are told to keep the code number ‘top secret’ until you receive your prize.

But, of course, the message is not from the United Nations. There is no prize. It is an advance fee scam designed to trick you into sending money and sensitive personal information to online criminals.

If you send a claim email as instructed, you will soon be advised that you must pay upfront fees before you can receive your prize. The scammers will claim that these fees are required to cover legal, banking, and insurance fees or pay tax obligations. The scammers will inform you that the fees cannot be deducted from the prize itself for legal reasons.If you comply and send the requested money, more requests will likely follow.And, as the scam progresses, the criminals may trick you into divulging a large amount of your personal and financial information, ostensibly to allow your win to be processed.

This information may later be used to steal your identity. And, the criminals will pocket any money you have sent and disappear once the scam is done.

Advance fee lottery scams are still very common and new victims fall for such scams every day. The scams are most commonly sent out via email, but advance fee criminals also use social media messages, SMS, and – as in this case – Skype to reach potential victims.