The Marks and Spencer Voucher Scam – A plee on behalf of Andy Curran.
Poor poor Andy Curran!
I recieved a mail this morning from a relative who thought i might be interested in this offer to recieve £100 of M&S vouchers if I forward the mail to 8 people but it must be CC’ed to Andy Curran at Persimmon Homes (Andy.curran@persimmonhomes.com)
I still find it hard to believe that people still fall for these type of cons but to be fair, when they are forwarded by well-meaning friends and relatives, they are hard to ignore.
I googled Andy Curran to find some more information on this poor guy. Hes obviously done something to really piss someone off!
A came across The Big Blog who had had the same idea as me and googled this guy and since mentioning this on his blog, has had a massive amount of hits on his site.
Well, to help poor Andy, i thought i would add to the blog noise and post about it here.
Please people, leave poor Andy alone…its a scam. The email has been doing the rounds for over 2 years now.
June 6, 2007
Hey cheers for the link. I wandered through the links to someone who had visited my site and put up their own post, and they had actually phoned up Persimmon Homes to find out if the guy was real. Evidently he’s on holiday at the moment, but I bet he’ll love his inbox when he gets back!!
June 8, 2007
I can’t believe people fall for this! Just got this email and from someone I haven’t heard from for ages….
If something sounds to good to be true then it is!
June 9, 2007
I actually kow a guy who knows him and he said it was done as a joke so that when he came back from holiday he would have afew emails………dont think anyone realised how big this would have got!!!
June 14, 2007
I have received the hoax email twice now and have not forwarded either time, this time I Googled it and found this site. This really was a very stupid joke to play on someone. As Bams said above, if it sounds too good to be true then it is!!! Emails cannot be tracked and no company would waste their time trying to do so in order to give something away free!
June 14, 2007
I spend 35 hours a week behind the till in M&S for around £500. BELIEVE ME, they’re not going to give you jack for sending 200 emails.
September 18, 2007
Hi
Very interesting information! Thanks!
G’night
September 18, 2007
pleasure!
July 26, 2008
It’s beyond me how many idiots continue to think they will get something for nothing. And they continue to do it again and again no matter how many time they DON’T receive a billion dollars into their account after sending 200,000 emails. And most of these idiots seem to be my friends!!!??? This is also a fantastic way for spammers to get hold of your emails as it is always included when everyone else sends it on. At least have the decency to BCC your address book if you’re endlessly dumb enough to keep falling for this shit!
September 30, 2008
If you look carefully at the Hoax message they’ve spelt persimmonhomes.com wrong – in fact what they’ve probably done is register a very similar URL and are using this Hoax message to harvest addresses for SPAM.
Sorry for the bad news everyone.
(if you don’t spot it they’ve added an S – persimmon*s*homes.com)
October 9, 2008
James. Yes, most of us have enough common sense to realise that it is obviously a scam, and undoubtedly too good to be true. But can you really blame people for wanting to believe that their gonna get lucky with something? There’s really no need for you to call people names, least of all people you apparently call friends. I think people feel stupid enough when they fall for it without you being so rude.
October 9, 2008
Sorry, said James not David!! Oops! :S
October 10, 2008
I don’t care what you say, I still like fish, dead or alive.
October 15, 2008
Yes, just reached Galway now. Thankfully I Googled it as I figured that M&S would never work in a Home building company to do it’s PR!
November 8, 2008
I got this e-mail this morning and thought straight away – oh yeah another one of these scam e-mails like “This kid is dying of cancer please send this on to as many people as you can so she’ll live” or “New virus alert – Microsoft have just released information on a virus that will eat your whole hard drive, computer and house too if you open the e-mail”.
I couldn’t honestly see that M&S would go for such a stupid spam mail scam. As for it being a problem for Andy Curran, it’s not just a problem for him it’s also bad for M&S as it’s making them look like a really bad company that endorses spam e-mails. I used to work on the M&S account at Vertex and I’m quite sure that name Andy Curran rings a bell. I don’t think that he’ll be getting many of them e-mails though as M&S IT guys have probably changed his e-mail address by now, they could even put an auto-responder on that e-mail address to explain to people it’s a con and that might stop as many people passing the e-mail on.
Also the other thing that told me it was a scam was that M&S wouldn’t use that name in an e-mail, having worked for M&S we were told that M&S isn’t called M&S anymore it’s actually called “Your M&S” to make it feel more customer friendly, until I’d worked for M&S I’d never noticed before that they’d added Your to their name!