Emirates airline issues warning over hoax email

Emirates airline has warned members of the public not to fall for the latest email scam.

The email claims to be from the Dubai-based carrier and suggests the recipient has been selected to take part in an ‘Emirates Rewarding Survey’.

In return, it says, the company will credit $1,500 AED to your bank account.

It goes on: “Only a small sample of Customers will receive the questionnaire. Each week we randomly select 200 lucky customers from different cities in Singapore, to your participation is vital to the survey.”

Although the email looks genuine, the sender address is from emirates@e.emirates.email.

A spokesperson for Emirates confirmed that the email is a scam and the security team was working on establishing who is responsible.

They warned: “We are aware of a phishing campaign mimicking our company’s marketing emails, whereby recipients were asked to complete a phony survey and provide their credit card details in return for frequent flyer miles and flight tickets. Our cybersecurity team is taking immediate action to take down the site, and has reported the incident to the relevant authorities.

“We’ve also informed customers contacting our call centres not to respond to the phishing email, and provided them with information on how to safeguard their accounts and personal information.”

If any customer suspects their account may have been compromised, they can visit https://emirates.com/security for more information.

Second scam

Meanwhile, David Standish, head of contentious insolvency at KPMG, has told The National that the recovery process for victims of the UTM Online Services scam could take years.

Victims of the AED440 million Ponzi scheme included Emirates airline employees who were duped out of their cash over a two-year period.

UTM Online Services had posed as a foreign currency investment firm, but were uncovered as a sham, along with a second firm called Exential, in late 2016.

Sydney Lemos was sentenced to over 500 years in prison in April, for his part in the fraud, each year accounting for one case against him.

Standish is quoted as saying: “There is still a lot of work to do but we are looking at certain legal actions both in the UK and other countries,” he said.

“People still do not understand that although a lot of the investors are in the UAE, the companies behind the scheme are British and the money went to eastern Europe.”