There is a new scam going around where small non-profit organizations are being targeted by a “Barbara Moratek” of the “Ivete Foundation“.
The email looks something like this:
———
From: B. Moratek- Ivete Foundation [mailto:bmoratek@ivetefoundation.org]
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 5:42 PM
To: <redacted>
Subject: Information for prospective donorsWould you have additional information for prospective donors or volunteers other than what is on your website? Thank you in advance.
Warm regards,
Barb
Barbara Moratek
Vice President, Director of Grant Programs
Ivete Foundation
Phone-
Fax- 800.397.7205
Web- www ivetefoundation.org
The spam email is likely some type of 419 scam.
However, Googling “Barbara Moratek” shows a bunch of links pushing fake codec Trojans and other junk sites (many on Blogger).
It’s likely that malware sites are taking advantage of the fact that people will be googling this name to find out more about it, by stuffing pages with the term “Barbara Moratek” (spamdexing), having purchased or otherwise acquired “zeitgeist” keywords (meaning, loading sites up with current “hot” keywords and then using them to lure people to their site).
Our research is continuing, but we felt it prudent to get a blog post up so that people googling this name will hopefully have some kind of warning.
Alex Eckelberry