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Is the Office Live sweepstakes legit?

A ‘sweepstakes winner’ email appears to come from Microsoft .. it looks very sincere but it’s a hoax.

You may have received a strange message recently that says you’re the winner of a sweepstakes run by Microsoft.

The message is headed:

Microsoft Office Live Workspace – Prize Winner Notification

and the ‘prize’ is a few cans of soda to be collected from an approved US retailer.

Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 do NOT recognize the message as spam or phishing even at the ‘High’ setting so it requires human judgement.

Anyone used to lot’s of spam and has heeded the warnings about phishing should be instantly suspicious  of the message … and they’d be right.

Microsoft has confirmed to Office Watch that the message is a hoax. 

The standard advice is to not click on email links to ‘unknown web sites’.  In this case the links don’t go to Microsoft.com, instead some site apparently made for the purpose.   That’s something that Microsoft itself often does for special promotions which makes it hard to tell ‘unknown’ sites from ‘known’ ones.

We’ve checked out the domain used and it is NOT registered to Microsoft, raising more red flags.  The domain name used includes the word ‘Microsoft’ and the registered details includes a name and address in the USA which gives it an air of legitimacy.

On the other hand, it’s hard to see how ‘winning’ some fizzy water helps promote Microsoft’s online services.

(For obvious reasons we’ve not quoted the message text, links or domain name in our article.)

You can’t be too careful … most phishing emails are poorly prepared and come in such numbers that its easy for software and humans to spot them.  Occasionally you get a more carefully prepared scam that can trap even the wary.

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