Scam of the day – September 28, 2014 – Email scams

admin

12 years ago

Everyone uses email which is why emails from identity thieves posing as your email provider are a constant threat. Below are copies of emails that I recently received from identity thieves. DO NOT CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS. These phony emails follow a familiar pattern. They indicate that there is an emergency that requires my immediate action. The emergency may relate to an unpaid bill, a security problem or an administrative problem. The identity thief counts on the victim to react emotionally and immediately click on the links provided. If you do click on the links one of two things can occur and both of them are bad. The first is that you are asked for information such as your email address, credit card number or other personal information that is then used to make you a victim of identity theft. This is called “phishing” when you are lured to a phony website that gathers information from you. The second thing that can happen is even more insidious. By clicking on the link, you may unwittingly download a keystroke logging malware program that will steal all of the information from your computer including your Social Security number, password, credit card numbers and banking information. The identity thief will then use this information to make you a victim of identity theft.

FIRST EMAIL

Your mailbox has exceeded the storage limit is 1 GB, which is defined by the administrator, are running at 99.8 gigabytes, you can not send or receive new messages until you re-validate your mailbox.

To renew the mailbox kindly CLICK HERE
Thank you!
Web mail system administrator!

WARNING! Protect your privacy. Logout when you are done and completely
exit your browser.

SECOND EMAIL

You will be blocked from sending and receiving emails if not confirmed within 24hrs of receiving this automated mail.

You are required to update through the link below.

UPDATE

Thanks for using Yahoo!
Yahoo Team.

TIPS

When AOL communicates with its customers about their accounts, they do so by AOL Certified Mail, which will appear as a blue envelope in your inbox and will have an official AOL Mail seal on the border of the email. The particular email purporting to be from AOL had neither although it did have a good counterfeit AOL logo. Whenever you get an email, you cannot be sure of from whom it really comes. The email purporting to be from Yahoo had a sender address that had nothing to do with Yahoo, but was obviously that of an innocent computer being used as part of a botnet. Never click on a link unless you are absolutely sure that it is legitimate. The better course of action is to contact the real organization that the email purports to be from at an address or phone number that you know is accurate in order to find out if the communication was legitimate or not. Additionally, it is important to always keep your Firewall and security software up to date to help protect you from the latest viruses and malware although, as I have reminded you many times, security software will only protect you about 5% of the time from the newest viruses and malware. It usually takes the security software companies about a month to catch up with security patches and updates to the latest threats so don’t depend on your security software to provide you with total protection.