Today’s Scam of the day is about a phishing email that purports to be from American Express. It was brought to my attention by a Scamicide reader who received it and frankly it is one of the most convincing phishing emails that I have seen in a long time. The graphics, grammar and overall appearance of the email is excellent. As always, the purpose of a phishing email is to lure you into clicking on links contained within the email or providing personal information. If you click on the links, you end up downloading malware and if you provide the requested information, it ends up being used to make you a victim of identity theft. This particular email indicates that unauthorized activity was detected on your American Express card and that you must review your account activity by clicking on a link in the email. Don’t do it! If you do you will provide your account information to an identity thief. The phishing email is reproduced below. The email also came with an American Express logo that appeared legitimate, however, such a logo is easy to counterfeit. One sign that this is a scam is that the email salutation is “Dear Customer” instead of using your name. Other indications that this is a scam are that the email does not indicate your account number and finally, the email address from which it was sent is not an email address of American Express.
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We use administrative technical and physical security measures to protect your personal information. These measures include computer safeguard and secured files and facilities. We take reasonable steps to securely destroy or permanently re-identify personal information. We reviewed your account and suspected that your Account might have been accessed by an unauthorized party.
Please log on to your account to review your recent account activity.
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Thank you for your Card Membership,a
American Express Customer Care
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If you’d like to stop receiving this alert, simply click here.
Was this e-mail helpful? Please click here
to give us your feedback.
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PRIVACY STATEMENT | UPDATE YOUR EMAIL
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Your account information is included above to help you recognize this as a customer care e-mail from American Express. To learn more about e-mail security or report a suspicious e-mail, please visit us at americanexpress.com/phishing. We kindly ask you not to reply to this e-mail but instead contact us via Customer Care.© 2019 American Express. All rights reserved. AGNEUALE0005003 |
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TIPS
Never click on links or download attachments in emails or text messages unless you have absolutely confirmed that they are legitimate. If you receive an email such as this and you have the slightest thought that it might be legitimate, you should call the 800 number on the back of your credit card to confirm that this is a scam. Finally, be careful if you do make the call to your credit card company because in some instances, enterprising scammers will purchase phone numbers that are only a digit off from those of legitimate credit card companies or banks in an effort to snare people who may mistakenly misdial the number when trying to contact their credit card company or bank.
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