MSI is warning the public regarding a scam being targeted to channel owners on Youtube claiming to be from MSI. The company is advising that any communication from an outside party not having the @msi.com domain name is not official and should be communicated with your local MSI official pages in social media. The content of the email may be similar below:
Individuals from a non-MSI domain will contact you offering products in exchange for a review. This is standard product review protocol so nothing in the email itself is suspicious except for the 3rd-party domain. MSI, along with other brands do tap PR agencies to handle press relations for them in certain regions alongside their internal marketing teams for their different business units so anyone who may be familiar with that practice may fall for this.
It is unclear what these individuals are after but seeing as they are quite specific on Youtube channels, it is possible they’re after either access or full control. A similar email has been sent to me contain the following text that I share in full below:
From: Corel <co*******************@vo***.cz>
Corel Studio, Inc.
Lõõtsa 5, 11415 Tallinn, Estonia
Esteemed Prospective Partner:
You, specifically your channel, have been selected from many YouTube channels to promote our new software “Corel Video Editor”.
If you will be ready to cooperate with our company and actively distribute videos with our software on your YouTube channel, then please answer this email and we will send you all the terms of the contract and the promotional video itself.
Kind regards,
John Bahringer
Customer Service Representative of Corel Studio, Inc.
Copyright 2023 Corel Studio. All rights reserved. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Again, much like their MSI email, no immediate reason for suspicion is given except for their domain which is not related to MSI or Corel. The domain volny.cz is a public email service similar to Gmail or Yahoo Mail wherein people can create their own email.
In the video below, we can see Youtuber Mayukh Sarkar sharing his experience with these emails and the comments also suggest that they have also received similar email offers. One thing that is common between our emails from MSI and Corel are the instructions for a file to be sent. In the case of MSI, its a product catalogue and in my case, its a contract agreement.
Reading thru the comment we see a comment from DGonzalez Tutoriales Unity en Español stating the following:
… I just recieved an email offering me to promote the game Stray. Everything seemed fine, until I downloaded the ZIP file and inside the “contract” folder, the contract was a pdf.scr file…
With this we now know they are planning to deliver malicious code to the target without doing obvious scams like asking for user accounts and passwords or sharing access to which most users will be very guarded about but many users may become curious and engage further overlooking the malicious code they may be sending to see what’s up with the offer.
