Phishing scams are nothing new.  They are a staple of scammers by which they send you an email that appears to come from a legitimate source, such as your bank or a company you do with business with such as Amazon or Netflix, either asking you to provide personal information, pay a phony debt or click on a malware infected link.  Providing personal information can lead to identity theft and downloading malware infected links can give access to your accounts such as online banking.

Sometimes you can recognize a phishing email because the email address of the sender will have no relation to the company purportedly sending the email.  This is because in many cases, scammers use botnets of hacked and infected computers to send the phishing emails from the email addresses of the people whose computers and email accounts have been hacked.  In other instances, the email of the sender may look legitimate and closely resemble the email address of the company the scammers are posing as, making it more difficult to recognize the email as a phishing email.

Phishing emails are now being sent from the address of no-reply@google.com that appear to be subpoenas requiring you to provide information about your Google account.  Clicking on a link in the phishing email would take you to the sites.google.com page where you would be directed to provide your Google account information which would turn over your account to the hacker.  The problem comes from scammers using Google’s Sites web-building app that enables scammers to not only create legitimate appearing emails and websites but also avoid the spam filters of your email provider.  Google has indicated that it is working on correcting this problem, but as of now has not succeeded in doing so.

TIPS

The way to avoid becoming a victim of this scam is to follow my advice as to any email that asks you to click on a link or provide personal information, namely never click on a link or provide personal information to any email regardless of how legitimate it may appear until you have confirmed that it is legitimate.  In the specific case of this type of email from Google, instead of clicking on a link go directly to your account through the official Google website to verify any such communications.

In addition, you should use dual factor authentication for all of your accounts when available so that even if you are tricked into providing your username and password, the scammer won’t be able to access your account.

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