The Only Free Cheese You Get Is In A Rat Trap

That was the advice I got when checking up recently on a wonderful sounding message from a Mr. Mark Taylor who claimed to be the Microsoft Fiduciary agent in the United Kingdom. His news was very tempting in these days of economic chaos and seemed to be risk free.



He told me that my e-mail address had been selected as the second winner of a free lottery and that I had won over $500,000.00 in Canadian dollars. (That would be roughly the Canadian equivalent of the English Pound.) Needless to say that would fill a lot of financial holes.



But the reality is that it would burn a hole in my pocket and leave me not richer but poorer by anywhere from some $400 to $1000 depending on how I wanted my winning cheque shipped.

Although I was suspicious about how I could be winning such an amount of money from a lottery I had never entered I did not Mr. Taylor's instructions to contact AirFer Couriers Limited in England to make arrangements for delivery of my winnings.

They responded with an e-mail telling me that yes they did have my cheque, but that I would have to pay for them to send it to me. I was to send them a payment to them by Western Union

This would range from $265. USD to $825. USD – depending on how I wanted the cheque shipped. They assured me that my winning cheque had been picked up from Microsoft Headquarters in England and was ready for dispatch to me – but I would have to remit the money to them by Western Union – first. All of this was beginning to sound more and more like a fraud to me.



And a fraud I found. To somebody easily captivated by the possibility of finding a $10,000 cash poke by "rolling up the rim of a Tim Horton's coffee cup here in Canada it was all very tempting and at first I was scratching my head to try and figure out how I might be able to raise that type of money – before I received some heartbreaking message from this Mr. Taylor that I had waited too long and they had cancelled my winning cheque. But in the end common sense prevailed and I decided to check it out.



I found the title for this post, " The only free cheese you find is in a rat trap" --and that certainly is true.

And in the end Microsoft confirmed my suspicious. They warned that all was an example of phishing – enticing victims to pay large sums of money up front in the hope of getting that promised "pot of gold".



In the security world security officers are warned to always assess, plan, and then act with stress on the assessing part of it when they run into unexpected situations. Obviously that is something we should all be doing in all areas of our lives in order to protect ourselves from very persuasive con artists like I ran into. And there are a number of very good web sites in England where particular scam originated as well as other countries. Check them out.

Protect yourself!