McDonald's voucher email a scam

An email scam was doing the rounds today, offering $50 McDonald's vouchers in exchange for filling out a survey and providing personal information, including credit card details.

A spokeswoman for the fast food restaurant said the scam had been tried about a month ago but had been less widespread and less polished. 

The scammers had not even managed to spell New Zealand correctly.

She said it was impossible to know how many people had received the latest version of the email, which asked people to click through to a website not linked to McDonalds, but their customer service call centre phones had been "ringing off the hook" all day.

McDonald's New Zealand displayed a warning on their homepage today, but it crashed due to overloading.

The spokeswoman said some customers had fallen for the scam and submitted their credit card details.

"We have advised them to contact their bank and the police."

In a statement today McDonald's said it would never request customers' bank or credit card details and apologised for any inconvenience the scam had caused.

"The source of the email scam is currently unknown and has been reported to the appropriate authorities," it said.

- NZPA

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Coen Dijkgraaf   #2   10:57 am Jul 07 2009

This scam is still running. I received a copy of this e-mail today as described at http://www.rockresearch.co.nz/blog/2009/04/29/how-to-spot-a-fake-online-survey/

Petra   #1   08:56 pm Apr 15 2009

How stupid do you have to be to give your credit card number to an unsolicited email? Unbelievable - those people should have their credit cards taken from them, they are going to cost their bank a lot of money!

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