An email which claimed to come on behalf of McDonald's food chain landed in my Inbox today - one I'd not seen before, so curiosity led me to check it out. (See attached image for the text in case you get one of these. Unless you use an email program like The Bat! which does not display remote images in emails you'll see an image in yours where mine has a red X in a square. That's because The Bat! does not allow remote images to be shown automatically in emails - these are often used for tracking and verifying email addresses are live.)
Anyhow, I digress.... back to the email. The link took me to a webpage which looked like the second image, and indeed contained just 7 questions and a submit button. By this time the hosting co seemed to have twigged they had a nasty on board as the page itself disappeared, along with the others which apparently followed it, so I wasn't able to follow through to see what the scam was.
But.... I found someone else who did and according to this useful blog page from February 2009:
http://momusings.com/momusings/2009/02/mcdonalds-survey.htmthe following pages asked you for your credit card details so they could credit you with the promised ?25 (yeah right, more likely to debit you with a lot more than that, of course!!!) and a success page saying all was now done.
So, the upshot is, if you get one of these emails offering you ?25 or whatever for filling in a survey, DON'T DO IT! You will lose a lot of money rather than gaining a small sum.
I've also read that that the same scam is being worked on an alleged survey for Walmart, so again, beware!
