Beware the Santa Claus Letter Scam
(Thinkstock)
No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. At the very least, Saint Nick is not offering to send you or your loved ones a special holiday greeting via email.
Editors at Yahoo Tech have received more than a dozen spam emails promoting “Letters from Santa,” a chestnut of scam that is almost as old as the Internet itself. They generally look like this:
Clicking the “Check It Out Now!” link inside each of these messages brings you to the “Official Letters From Santa 2014” site, where for the low, low price of just $19.95 you can ask the jolly old fella to send an “official” Christmas greeting to your wee ones.
We don’t recommend it. At the very minimum, you’re paying $20 for a piece of paper. More likely, you won’t get anything at all for your money. Worse, these clowns now have your name, email address, and credit card information.
Read: 5 Cyber Monday Scams to Avoid
Here’s one way to tell it’s a scam: Look at the badges on the bottom of the shopping cart professing how secure, reliable, and trusted the site is.
If these badges were genuine, you’d be able to click each one and be taken to a site that verifies its authenticity. Click on these, however, and nothing happens. They’re just static images. Scam, hello?
This is hardly the only site operated by these jokers. They also run Santa’s Official Naughty List, where you can allegedly have Santa send “You’ve Been Naughty” grams to your loved ones. The same outfit is behind Magical Christmas Packages, Santa’s Angry, Santa’s Not Happy, North Pole Magic Snow, and others.
The contact address for the site links to a variety of Florida-based companies (or one company with many names), including Prime Time Ads Inc., Attractive Ads Media, Multi-Meridian Inc., Connectivity Marketing and Media, and Premium Source Nutrition.
Calling the toll-free number listed on the Santa websites produces nothing but silence. Calls to an anonymous voice mailbox at Attractive Ads Media, listed on the Naughty List domain registration, were not returned.
What else do these people sell? Well, fake facelifts in a bottle, for one. Ever wonder how Santa maintains his youthful appearance, despite being, like, a thousand years old? Now you know.
More likely, though, is that these emails came not from the North Pole or Florida but from Russia. Domains used to redirect links inside the faux Santa emails are registered to email addresses and phone numbers in the former Soviet Union.
There may well be legitimate sites that promise to send your kids a letter from Santa, but these aren’t it.
Questions, complaints, kudos? Email Dan Tynan at ModFamily1@yahoo.com.
