Warning About Electronic Greeting Cards

This is a warning about a virtual greeting card website that is using some underhanded, though perfectly legal, marketing tactics. If you receive a virtual greeting card from this website, you will be asked to install a program in order to view it. This program will then use your Outlook address book to email itself to all contacts in your contact list.

Due to the fact that this program requires users to download an installer and agree to allow the program to email a link to the website to all Microsoft Outlook contacts, it is not considered to be a virus.

This application works when visiting a specific webpage on the www.friendgreetings.com website. A link to this page arrives in an email message as described below. Once this page has loaded, users are prompted to download and run an installer package.

Selecting Yes will download the installer.

An MSI installer package is run and the user is prompted to accept two End User License Agreements (EULA). Within the second EULA is the following statement

Once this agreement has been accepted, the program emails all users in your Outlook Address book with the following message:

Subject: %Recipient% you have an E-Card from %Sender%.
Body:
Greetings!
%sender% has sent you an E-Card -- a virtual postcard from FriendGreetings.com.
You can pickup your E-Card at the FriendGreetings.com by clicking on the link below.
http://www.friendgreetings.com/pickup/pickup.aspx?code=%recipient%&id=%code%
Message:
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%Recipient%,
I sent you a greeting card. Please pick it up.
%Sender%
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