Phishing?

[half geek]

I received this message through my team's webmaster@ email address. Google has no records of "Genexis Technologies." I am trying to determine if this is a spider looking for keywords or following links from robotics web sites, or (seemingly unlikely) legitimate. Has anyone else seen this?
Cheers.

"Dear Sir,

We are a singapore based company specializing in Robotics Educational Products and hightech education.
Our focus is in providing the best means of technology & academic education with the means of Robotics as a platform for teaching.

Our microcontrollers include products like,
- PIC Controllers
- MSC-51
- Basic Stamp
- Fujitsu
- Javelin Stamp
- PSoC
- MSP430
- Motorolla M68HC11
- i-BOX

and sensors like,
- CMUCAMS
- Force Sensors
- Gyro Sensors
- Compass Sensors
and much more...

Our Robotic Kits are also in many varieties and low in cost as well, which are very suitable for educational learning for schools.

We would like to explore the possibility of providing our robotics products for school as well as Robotics competitions as well.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Genexis Technologies.
genexis_tech@yahoo.com
Singapore."

[Mike]

Originally Posted by half geek

I received this message through my team's webmaster@ email address. Google has no records of "Genexis Technologies." I am trying to determine if this is a spider looking for keywords or following links from robotics web sites, or (seemingly unlikely) legitimate. Has anyone else seen this?
Cheers.

"Dear Sir,

We are a singapore based company specializing in Robotics Educational Products and hightech education.
Our focus is in providing the best means of technology & academic education with the means of Robotics as a platform for teaching.

Our microcontrollers include products like,
- PIC Controllers
- MSC-51
- Basic Stamp
- Fujitsu
- Javelin Stamp
- PSoC
- MSP430
- Motorolla M68HC11
- i-BOX

and sensors like,
- CMUCAMS
- Force Sensors
- Gyro Sensors
- Compass Sensors
and much more...

Our Robotic Kits are also in many varieties and low in cost as well, which are very suitable for educational learning for schools.

We would like to explore the possibility of providing our robotics products for school as well as Robotics competitions as well.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Genexis Technologies.
genexis_tech@yahoo.com
Singapore."

Immediate things that pop out:

• @yahoo.com, they can provide all this but can't afford a $9.95/year domain?
• Singapore. Although most tech-related companies are more prevalent in Asia, a good sign of something phishy is some kind of international address. See: Vietnamese botnets and Nigerian scams
• Random capitalization. Why would a huge "official" company capitalize things that aren't proper nouns? (Robotics Educational Products, Our Robotic Kits, etc.)
• Not-so-perfect grammar. If I remember my 8th grade grammar class, it should be " Our microcontrollers include products such as,". I think using "like" is grammar-legal in informal conversations, but if I were to propose my products to a potential client, I would make sure it's formal.
• Also, "our microcontrollers include products". Wouldn't it correctly be "our microcontrollers include brands". A microcontroller is the product, they list different brands of microcontrollers.
• Redundancy in sensor listings. They already stated that they are going to list sensors, so theres no need to add "Compass Sensor, Gyro Sensors, etc."

I wouldn't trust them. Ask them for something similar to a business license, or a website, or a phone number to call, etc.

-Mike

[half geek]

Hey Mike, I tend to agree with these analyses. If I'm looking for any of those things, the last thing I will do to look for a vendor is check my email. Much less would I look for one "phishy" as that. My main curiosity is how they are getting email addresses.

[PARhodes]

Shouldn't singapore be capitalized. If they are trying to be all high tech and teacher related they should spell right. Its a bug.

[Adam Richards]

Originally Posted by Mike

Immediate things that pop out:

• Random capitalization. Why would a huge "official" company capitalize things that aren't proper nouns? (Robotics Educational Products, Our Robotic Kits, etc.)
• Not-so-perfect grammar. If I remember my 8th grade grammar class, it should be " Our microcontrollers include products such as,". I think using "like" is grammar-legal in informal conversations, but if I were to propose my products to a potential client, I would make sure it's formal.

Note that they are from Singapore; English is likely to not be their first language. In foreign languages, different capitalization rules and grammar syntaxes are used, so "like" rather than "as" could sound fine for them, especially if they learned language first through speaking to English-speaking natives, as opposed to learning in a classroom setting, as many of us are taught the foreign languages we use.

Capitalization is also another thing that varies between languages. For example, in French, Monday is written lundi, Tuesday is mardi, Wednesday is mercredi, with no capitalization on the first letter.

I'm not saying that this letter is automatically a legitimate email, but rather that those two criteria that you used are not always applicable if the client is from a foreign country and they do not have a full understanding of the English language.

[Andrew Blair]

Appears to be bad. Heres the closest thing I could find:

http://www.genexis.nl/about.html

Its out of the netherlands, and is a tech. company. Perhaps somebody needed a technology name, googled it, and picked the one on top mostly.

But who knows. I googled "Genexis Technologies". A couple of pages on, I found this site: http://www.swxx.net/

However, the site was down, or gone. So I www.archive.org 'd it. I found an oriental site, though, my asian has gone downhill over the past couple of years...

http://web.archive.org/web/200503040.../www.swxx.net/

[aaeamdar]

This e-mail looks something like one my mom received from Nigerians having bank account problems (they weren't really). The simplest thing to do is ignore it, unless you have an overwhelming need to buy Singaporean (?) CMU Cams.

Best of luck,
Paul

[Mr. Freeman]

Genexis Technologies.
genexis_tech@yahoo.com
Singapore.

Why would they end an email with "Singapore."? I've never seen a company sign a letter, much less an email, with a geographic location. It's not even an full address, which would make slightly more sense.

Again, the "@yahoo.com" is a huge give away. Most likely fake. Though the odd thing is, there's no link to click on or a website to go to. They just want you to email them back and they didn't request info like credit card numbers.

I think you should ignore the email.

[Katie Reynolds]

I got the same email this morning.

I deleted it after reading, "dear sir".

[Clark Gilbert]

I also got that exact same message today. I was very surprised that my Purdue spam filter didnt grab it, but it's been letting through about 1 message every day for the past week.

[DCA Fan]

Hey, I got the same message as well. I'm decently sure that it's spam. In any case, I'm not going to bother pursuing it.

[Justin Montois]

Thats interesting that all these FIRST mentors/students got this E-mail. I wonder if it is somones practical joke or something. I dont know if FIRST keeps any sort of mass Email directory so I wonder how they would even get these names unless it's a inside job.(A joke or something)

[grildrig]

Hello people!

Just to let you know... I live in Mexico and I have a small animatronics company (yes... in Mexico). And I have been receiving exactly that quoted mail four times in the last 3 months. Then I decided to do a Google search of the company... and ended up finding your board
Greetings from Mexico! (and greetings to any Singapoorean who may eventually could be reading this).