The Royal Marsden has been made aware of fraudsters using its name in an email scam. Anyone receiving an email from info@royalmarsden.nhs.uk claiming that they have won a prize from a patient's legacy should be suspicious.
If you do receive such an email, please alert us by sending a copy of the email to
patientcentre@rmh.nhs.uk. You should also inform your email provider. Do not reply with the personal details which the email asks for.
How the scam works
Even though the email address would normally indicate that the email has originated from The Royal Marsden, this is not the case. A technique known as email spoofing allows people to make an email appear that it has come from a trusted source.
This following is taken from the
Wikipedia article on email spoofing:
E-mail spoofing is a term used to describe (usually fraudulent) e-mail activity in which the sender address and other parts of the e-mail header are altered to appear as though the e-mail originated from a different source. E-mail spoofing is a technique commonly used for spam e-mail and phishing to hide the origin of an e-mail message. By changing certain properties of the e-mail, such as the From, Return-Path and Reply-To fields (which can be found in the message header), ill-intentioned users can make the e-mail appear to be from someone other than the actual sender. The result is that, although the e-mail appears to come from the address indicated in the From field (found in the e-mail headers), it actually comes from another source.
Contents of the email
The email looks like it has been sent from info@royalmarsden.nhs.uk and has the following contents:
Dear Sir/Ma,
On behalf of THE ROYAL MARSDEN NHS FUNDING TRUST/HOSPITAL executives in partnership with THE INSTITUTE OF CANCER RESEARCH (I.C.R), I am please to inform you that your email address has been anonymously chosen among other five(5) individuals for the James D. Brock £3,500,00GBP (Three Million and Five Hundred Thousand Great British Pounds) Man-Power development award, during the just concluded International emails address jackpot.
Late Mr. James D. Brock of 12, High West Street, Dorchester, Dorset was a cancer patient in our hospital, and he died on the 8th of January, 2010 at exactly 5:23PM. Among others, his last wish was to award this cash prize to 5 individual anonymously all over the world for the main purpose of promoting Cancer awareness and helping less privilege living with cancer in their community. We are mandated to carry out this Last Wish without compromise.
For your benefit payment processing, you are to contact the under listed Fiduciary agent/Legal Officer (Barrister, Gordon F. Smith) by providing your :
(1).Full Names
(2).Valid Phone Number
(3). Address.
Upon the receipt of the above information, your payment processing shall be initiated and concluded by this assigned officer (Barrister, Gordon F. Smith).
Send details to:
Name: Gordon F. Smith. EMAIL:medlam.chambers@gmail.com
Yours faithfully,
Alerting the public
The Royal Marsden is in no way connected with the fraudsters sending these emails. They are using our name, not our actual IT systems. They may not even be based in the UK.
We are grateful to the members of the public who alerted us to this scam. We hope that by publicising this deceit, fewer people will fall prey to the fraudsters.