Fighting malware and spam

EMI/Time Warner

The following is the text usually shown in the EMI/Time Warner hoax email. There may be other variations on a similar theme, as well as other language versions.

Hoax text

 Subject: Fwd: Free record vouchers

ALL PLEASE READ THE BELOW EMAIL IF YOU ACTION ASAP YOU WILL RECIEVE SOME
MONEY & MUSIC VOUCHERS

Subject: FW: EMI and Time Warner.
Due to the merger between EMI and Time Warner announced yesterday, an
unprecendented opportunity to make FREE money and receive FREE gifts has
arisen. As you have probably heard, Time Warner recently announced a
merger with AOL.

AOL is the world's largest Internet Service Provider, and is eager to
increase it's market share by providing a Unique Selling Point.

Time Warner, AOL and EMI have begun to conduct a feasability study in
music delivery via email, and so are collating data on the way in which
emails are disseminated between family, collegues and friends.

AOL has cleverly encoded this email with a unique identifier, which
allows them to track all the senders and recipients. IT DOES NOT MATTER
IF YOU ARE USING AN APPLE MACINTOSH OR PC !! EMI has promised that for
every 10 people that you forward this mail to, they will send you Pound
10 pounds in record vouchers. Time Warner has promised that for every
person that forwards your mail, they will send you a Pound 50 cheque.

I must admit that I thought this would be one of those standard internet
scams but yesterday I was emailed by representatives of both EMI and
Time Warner asking for my home address. This morning I had both a Pound
10 record voucher to spenD at any HMV and a NatWest cheque made out to
me for Pound 50 !!

If you only send out this mail to as many people as you can then you can
also take advantage of this offer.

What do you have to lose ???
	

VB reminds users: if you receive a virus warning message, do not forward the message to all your friends/colleagues, as it may suggest in the text. If you have verified that the message is a hoax, simply delete it. If you are unsure, forward the message to your IT administrator. Failing that, forward it to hoax@virusbtn.com. It is possible that you may receive a hoax email with a file attachment. Since it is possible that these attachments could be infected VB advises such files to be be treated with the same caution as any other unexpected message attachment and urges users not to open them.

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