Commemorative Mugs
In the wake of the royal wedding announcement for William and Kate, a social engineering experiment on the web set out to test our gullibility. Does it prove we are all easy marks? Or does it show how easy facts can be interpreted to suit a conclusion.
An organisation called Scam Detectives created a hoax website selling "Golden Tickets" to the "social event of the millennium". The website also claimed that one lucky guest would be chosen to appear in the wedding photos. Tickets were advertised at $250 each. Anyone who clicked on the "Buy now" button was informed it was a hoax and warned that had it been real, they could have handed over their card details to a crook.
According to Scam Detectives, the site attracted more than 160 visitors in just twelve hours, with the first visitors arriving within three minutes of the site going live. Scam Detectives editor, Charles Conway, said "Had this been a real scam, it could have netted up to £33,000 in the first 12 hours."
I take issue with that claim. If visitors were arriving within three minutes of the site being created then it is much more likely that they were web robots which were aware of the newly registered domain name and were scraping the site for email addresses and vulnerable forms. Even for the real visitors, clicking on the Buy Now button at the bottom of a single page website does not signify they were willing to hand over credit card details. Much more likely was that they were looking for more information, and the "small print" to see what the front page was not telling them.
However, that's not to say that other sites won't be trying this scam for real, along with email scams and so on, especially as there are seemingly genuine reports that a lottery will be held by the Palace to allocate one hundred tickets to members of the public. Already, some websites are awash with questions from people both inside and outside the UK asking how they can obtain tickets.
No doubt on April 29th there will be plenty of commemorative mugs on sale for people who want a souvenir of the day, and by April 30th there will be plenty for sale on E-bay.
21st December 2010
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.