EN
We received a message from Nenita who lives in the Philippines. She got an email from the ID ua646730@gmail.com informing her that she has qualified to receive a sum of USD 210,000 from the UN-ASEAN Relief Fund. Nenita wanted to know whether this email is legitimate.
The most obvious red flag is that no genuine organization will email people out of the blue using Gmail IDs. United Nations uses the domain @un org and ASEAN use @asean org for email communications. Secondly, relief fund payments are never distributed directly to individuals using lucky draws.UN works with the partner nations of ASEAN to release funds through official means.
This seems to be a typical of case a customs parcel scam. Nenita mentioned that after replying to the mails and asking the certificate to be delivered to her, she was asked to pay courier and insurance fees. We are pretty sure that she would have had to pay more fees if she had gone ahead with this scam. With such scams, the parcel often tends to get 'stuck at customs' and an enormous fee would be required to get it released. Victims often look at the hefty promised amount, USD 210,000 in this case, and decide that it's a relatively small price to pay. Of course, they realize their mistake when they never actually receive the funds.
Thanks to Nenita for sharing this with us. Being a little careful saved her from getting scammed!
