Visit London contest
How would you like to visit London for free? Sure. I’d love to win the visit London contest. And, in yesterday’s mailbag there was an email about a visit London contest from VisitLondon.com. The prize included round trip airfare, a four-night stay in a Radisson-Blu Edwardian London hotel, and tickets to exhibitions and shows in London. The visit London contest was being sponsored by the Edwardian Group and the Mayor of London. Sound good? Well…not exactly.
The contest is real and can be found on the VisitLondon.com website.
However, all of the links in the visit London contest email lead back to a website that has been blacklisted for sending spam. This is a sophisticated email in many respects.
- Professional photos embedded in the email.
- Only one typo, and grammar mistakes. (The exception was the return address, which was “Visit London Partener.” (Note the extra “e” in partner).
- No ridiculous claims of winning a visit London contest I never entered.
How to spot the visit London contest as a fake
The email I received was quite well done. One of the tricks the sender used to fool the spam blockers was to include a 354-word mini-essay in plain text on raising a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Where most spammers (so far) have chosen to “hide” this text by using multiple paragraph returns and placing the text far down the page, this one chose to hide it in plain sight.
The mini-essay was hidden by putting the text on a black background. The email included photos, so this large black space, which included an unsubscribe link and the registered trademark information for London & Partners, didn’t seem quite so obvious. If you receive an email containing a large black background in one section, beware. The blacked out area might be a disguise to hide the extra text, which is used to make the email seem less malicious to a spam blocker.
