Today’s Scam of the day is about a phishing email presently circulating that attempts to lure you into clicking on a link in order to continue using your email account from an undescribed email server. I have written in the past of similar phishing emails specifically targeting AOL users, but in this particular phishing email the scammer is casting a much wider net, hoping to catch people who use many different email services by not specifically naming which email service the email purports to be from.
If you click on the link in the phishing email copied below where it reads “UPGRADE NOW TO THE NEWEST VERSION” one of two things can occur and both are bad. Either you will end up providing personal information to an identity thief or you will, merely by clicking on the link, download dangerous malware such as ransomware on to your phone, computer or other device.
Here is the email presently being circulated. The link where it reads “UPGRADE NOW TO THE NEWEST VERSION ” has been disabled. If you had hovered your mouse over the original link, you would have seen that it would have taken you to a site that wasn’t related to any email provider.
Please follow the link below to update your account:UPGRADE NOW TO THE NEWEST VERSION
Thanks,
2022 Admin Notification.
Whenever you get an email, you cannot be sure who is really sending it. In the case of this email, the email address of the sender had no relation to any email provider and most likely was the email address of someone whose email account was hacked and made a part of a botnet of computers used by cybercriminals to send such communications. The email address of the sender uses a hotmail account, but nowhere in the email is there a reference to hotmail.
Never click on a link unless you are absolutely sure that it is legitimate. If you think the email might be legitimate, the best thing to do is to contact the real company that the email purports to be from at an email address or phone number that you know is accurate in order to find out if the communication was legitimate or not.
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