Another UPS email scam

In September 2011, I published in this blog an article titled How to identify some email scams.

A couple of days ago, I received another scam email claiming to come from UPS and once more from China. This time it had an attachment, and the first thing that made me suspicious was that the attachment was in HTML format, as I expect invoices attached to emails to be in PDF format.

But it was a very smart scam, because by claiming that they were sending an invoice, they played on the resentment of receiving an unjustified bill, which could result in carelessness.

Here is the snapshot of the email:

The links pointed to myapp-ups.com/main.php?page=03def465fa1423ac. The inclusion of "ups" in the domain name was clearly intended to allay any doubt that the mail was legitimate, but I don't think that UPS would use a domain name with "myapp" in it. I can imagine dozens of Chinese (and perhaps non-Chinese as well) scammers frantically registering all possible "whatever-ups.com" domain names, and send millions of emails to gullible westerners...

I searched the whois database to see who had registered myapp-ups.com and this is what I got:

This is what scammers do on Valentine days: they register domains for their scams...