An email arrives saying Tesco Payback Rewards. It is the beginning of September. You have spent up to your limit on the credit cards over the summer holidays and are wondering how to pay the bills until the next pay cheque arrives, when what looks like a miracle happens. An email arrives apparently from Tesco saying Tesco Payback Rewards that offers you £150 for filling in a Tesco customer satisfaction survey. Woo Hoo, you think, That will pay my grocery bill for the rest of the month, lets give it a go. Sorry to disappoint you folks but it is a scam and is a phishing fraud designed to steal your bank and credit card details.
The email says something like this
Tesco Customer Satisfaction program selected you to take part in our quick survey.
To earn your 150 £ reward, please click here and complete the form.
This Tesco Payback Rewards scam wants your personal details and your credit card and bank details. Many of them are also designed to specifically steal your email, facebook and other social network log in details.
Please read our How to protect yourselves page for simple, sensible advice on how to avoid being infected by this sort of socially engineered malware.
The original email looks like the words above, and of course at this time of year ( or anytime of year) we all need a few extra pennies and the offer of a £150 from Tesco for filling in a Tesco customer satisfaction survey is always welcome. It will NEVER be a genuine email from Tesco or any other supermarket, so don’t ever follow the link to a website that looks at first glance like a genuine Tesco surveys website. You know it must be fake because Tesco don’t have satisfied customers and Tesco definitely never give money away, they only take it from you with high prices in their shops.
If you open the link you see a webpage looking like This: ( I had to split it into 3 parts to take a screenshot)
All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email or follow links in them . Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day.
Or whether it is a straight forward attempt, like this one, to steal your personal, bank, credit card or email and social networking log in details. Be very careful when unzipping them and make sure you have “show known file extensions enabled“, And then look carefully at the unzipped file. If it says .EXE then it is a problem and should not be run or opened.