Happy Ten pyramid game can lead to identity theft

Graham Cluley
@gcluley

Katherine in our marketing department received this letter through her postbox yesterday, inviting her to take part in a pyramid game called “Happy Ten”.

The idea is that you put £10 in the bank account of player number one, and then forward the letter on to as many people as you can (removing the name of the stranger you just gave £10 too, and shifting all the other names one place up the list).

According to the letter’s author you could have £100,000 or more in your account in next to no time! Marvellous!

And what do you know? The person who passed on the chain letter has given her the bank account details of ten customers of Lloyds TSB, Barclays and the NatWest bank.

Now, firstly, if you really believe that you’re going to get rich from something like this then there’s a marvellous Opera House in Sydney that I’d like to sell you.

But secondly, are these people crazy passing on their bank account details to complete strangers?

The worry is that there are…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.