Warning! There’s a phishing scam under way that is targeting Baltimore businesses and residents. If you think you’re a victim of this or any other internet scam, contact Poindexter immediately for computer repair, account recovery options, and next steps.
“Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.[1][2] The word is a neologism created as a homophone of fishing due to the similarity of using fake bait in an attempt to catch a victim. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, banks, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure unsuspecting victims.”
This particular scam arrives as an email, purporting to be from Google. The email includes subjects like “Warning,you are required to go through the process,” “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)!!!,” or “Your account might be disabled, fix error.” The body of the email might contain are warning about your email account, recommending that you visit a link to change your port settings and retrieve your missed messages. We received three such emails in two days and have been contacted by two clients asking whether or not to respond to them. The email we received is provided below, but without the offending links.
This is an autmomated email sent from our SSL severs to inform you that there is an error in your email configuration.
This error was identified on: 2015/09/24 and we have not been able to deliver 8 contact email messages from this date.
To retrieve your emails and reconfigure Port 486,Click Here
Warning: Failure to do this will lead total suspension of your email account.
This message has been sent to:[email protected].
Please delete and Ignore if this is not your email address
Clicking any of the provided links will direct your internet browser to a fraudulent page designed to look like Google’s account setting page. It will prompt you to enter your username and password; the site then sends those details to whoever is responsible for the scam, compromising your account.
If you receive an email like this or with an attachment claiming to be from Google or any other account provider, delete immediately. Do not click any of the included links. If you did follow through and enter your email and password on the phishing page, change your Google account password immediately.
Google, Bing, Microsoft, and every other major webmail provider will never ask you to change your port settings. They will never threaten to close your account in this way. And they will never ever include sensitive account details or service requests as an attached PDF file. Unusual stuff like this is a warning sign that the email isn’t genuine and might be a scam or worse.
