03/29/2022
So I am familiar with seeing a LOT of phishing scams, they are usually pretty easy to spot due to the "from" email address if you hover over it you can see it's some junk email.
However, there are many who still fall for this... like my elderly mother on a couple occasions.
This boils my blood and I make a point to report them all when I do see them. Almost every big-name company which most of these people pretend to be has an Abuse or Phishing Security Dept that you can forward the email to.
Today by far was one of the best phishing emails I’ve seen yet.
The “From” address looked legit, it associated with Quickbooks as if they partnered on this service. I recently started using Quickbooks, so it caught my attention. It was a notice that they were billing me for Internet Security...
Now it should have caught my attention, that if were from GeekSquad then the from address would have been GeekSquad also... not the "mix" of both... Also, it was sent to the wrong email address... but still looked legit enough for me to check it instead of immediately reporting it as B.S.
If you run across something that doesn’t seem right first thing you should do is NOT click any buttons in the email. Don’t click on any Attachments.
If it involves a company you are associated with, go into a new window and google that company and call them from that number, not any of the numbers in the email.
Report the email as phishing, again you can usually look them up rather quickly… I’ve sent so many it comes up in my saved settings.
The easy one for me is when I get a scam email for something I don’t own… Like Netflix…. I still report it though.
So here is the one today that almost got me… at least got my dander up enough to take the time to fully make sure this was bogus, which sucks because that is time away from other things I need to be working on.
However, if I can write a post about to warn others, that makes the time and effort worth it.
I forwarded this email to both Intuit (Quickbooks) and GeekSquad which goes through Best Buy.
Be savvy and think twice… their objective it to get a quick reaction, and to get you upset and then confused (as they did with my mother, but she finally dialed into the scam and hung up), but we did have to put an alert on her account and change a few passwords. Be Safe out there!