Phony $1,000 Target Gift Card is the Scam of the Year
Jan-23-2013

A fake contest for a $1,000 Target gift card has been declared 2012's "Scam of the Year" by online complaint resolution platform Scambook.

The fraud, which Scambook spotted back in November, actually spread via text rather than through social media or email channels. Victims of this "smishing" (SMS phishing) scheme received a text reading "Your entry last month WON! Go to TargetContests.com enter winning code 3847 to claim your FREE $1000.00 Target gift card within 24hrs." Gullible users who clicked through to the (now-defunct) website and entered the code were prompted to enter a wide range of personal information, but never got their hands on the promised gift card.

The Target scam followed similar scams promising gift cards from the likes of Walmart and Best Buy. And according to Scambook's Kase Chong, those two scams (in January and April, respectively) were smaller test runs for the main event, which dropped like a nuclear bomb in mid-November and prompted more than a hundred complaints to Scambook overnight.

"We believe that it was meant to center around the shopping holiday season," says Chong, who estimates that between 200,000 and 350,000 people across the country received the text on their cell phone. The scammers likely used a random-number generator that picked potentially active cell numbers with a reasonably high success rate.

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