M&S vouchers are fakes

An email apparently sent by Marks & Spencer, offering £100-worth of vouchers if you forward it on to friends, is a hoax.

The email asks you to send it on to at least eight other people, while copying in a legitimate email address from Persimmon Homes, which it also says is involved with the offer.

Both Marks & Spencer and Persimmon Homes have denied any involvement but there is a worry that people who benefited from a Threshers voucher, which circulated mistakenly before Christmas last year, will believe it to be genuine and pass it on.

"This email is 100 per cent phoney but unfortunately it is fooling users because it seems plausible given the growing trend for companies, such as Threshers, to make offers via email," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

The fact that the email asks the recipient to copy in an existing email address at Persimmon Homes could also cause problems for the company, as a large volume of emails could overwhelm its servers.

"Email spreads like wildfire and forwarding one copy could result in 100 more being sent. The rapid circulation of an email hoax such as this could result in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the email servers of, in this case, Persimmon," said Cluley.

www.sophos.com

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