Within the past month or so, I received a warning from Sony about fraudulent e-mails claiming to be from Sony but that actually were not. The deceptive e-mails were designed to lure Sony customers into divulging personal information at a fake Sony site. It "falsely indicates that it is from SonyStyle.com" and "includes a link to a bogus SonyStyle.com registration site"
So, I was shocked to notice that the e-mail from Sony that was supposedly warning about deceptive e-mails and URLs was itself guilty of using apparently deceptive or "fraudulent" URLs!
Within the text, it contained a couple of URLs that, in the HTML version of the e-mail, deceptively show up as www.sonystyle.com, but in fact pointed to some other site at m0.net. Here is one of the deceptive URLs from Sony:
http://news.sonystyle.m0.net/m/S.asp?HB9483736521X2571692X218821X
Not to mention that the From address of the e-mail was also from the same site: sonystyle@news.sonystyle.m0.net
Should you trust the warning e-mail? Sure. The contents are benign enough. Just think twice about clicking those links or replying to the e-mail! Sony is surely using a company to send out the mass e-mailings and to track the "click-through" responses, but that seems like a pretty poor choice in this context!
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