Email Fraud Alert received from: Chris
I recently received an email with this subject line: FOR YOUR URGENT ATTENTION and I am concerned that it could be an attempt at defrauding me. Let me know in the comments section what you think, please.
The full contents of the suspected fraudulent (phishing / scamming) e-mail appear below:
I write in respect of your fund brought to the department of National Treasury earlier today from Reserve bank under your name.
From the reports contained in the file having your information attached to the fund, the fund was supposed to be transferred to you from Reserve bank, but was not due to some reasons that were not mentioned in the file. The fund is 9.5m USD. Are you aware of the fund? This notification stands as the first and final notice to you for you to claim your fund and after 5 working days of this notification, if I do not hear from you, I will have no option than to declare the fund government’s fund.
Please re-confirm the following details;
1, Your full name and address.
2, Your age and occupation.
3, Your cell phone number.
Revert back to me as soon as get this email, so that we can process the release your fund to you.
Yours Sincerely.
Malusi Gigaba
Honorable Minister of Finance,
Republic of South Africa.
The above email was sent by “Malusi Gigaba Honorable Minister of Finance” from this email address: malusigigabasafm@treasury.gov.za
I, Chris, have the following thoughts/comments on this suspected fraudulent email message from “Malusi Gigaba Honorable Minister of Finance”:
If you received an e-mail from Malusi Gigaba Honorable Minister of Finance with a return address displayed as malusigigabasafm@treasury.gov.za would you think twice about it’s authenticity?
Looking a bit deeper into the email I received I saw that the reply-to was actually malusigigaba_min_fin@minister.com.
I visited minister.com only to be presented with a BLANK Page.
The Wayback Machine shows that minister.com was for sale on 21 October 2016 – https://web.archive.org/web/20161021123644/http://minister.com/ and is owned by:
Name: ATTN Domain Inquiries
Organization: World Media Group, LLC
Street: 90 Washington Valley Rd., #1128
City: Bedminster
State: NJ
Postal Code: 07921
Country: US
Phone: +1.9089030200
Fax: +1.9082759105
Email: email@world.comSee: https://www.whois.com/whois/minister.com
At one stage minister.com gave away free email addresses so that could be the source of the troubles and scam above. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20000301042132/http://www.minister.com:80/member/login.page
This led to a number of 419 scams being run under minister.com and the following are some of the email addresses used in these scams:
africancourt11@minister.com
don.j.a.g@minister.com
dr.yayi.boni@minister.com
efccheadoffice024@minister.com
elizabethdipoupeters1@minister.com
emmanuel_ozor@minister.com
excellency@minister.com
federalministryofinterioaccraghana@minister.com
financeminister.gov@minister.com
fmfng@minister.com
ghana-minister-offinance@minister.com
hendzu@minister.com
humanrightsdepartment@minister.com
info.c@minister.com
internationalmonetaryimf@minister.com
jack090@minister.com
jewel_haword@minister.com
jewel_howard@minister.com
kovicgreenukl@minister.com
magu_ng@minister.com
maryngu@minister.com
mrs.dianearfitt@minister.com
mrs.dianegarfitt@minister.com
mrs.sarahceeiliaelijah@minister.com
ngozi.okonjo@minister.com
officeoftheminister_fmf@minister.com
prof.h.b.mkhize@minister.com
reverendpaul@minister.com
revjoseph@minister.com
shabangususanrsa@minister.com
un.grant@minister.com
un.treasury@minister.com
vusimsiza@minister.comTo which we need to add malusigigaba_min_fin@minister.com and ask the question; “Why does the owner of the domain continue to allow email to be routed through their server and domain, or are they involved?”