Want to get my easy to follow Tech Tips in your email?
Sign up for my daily Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter!
There’s yet another very dangerous email scam making the rounds right now, and unfortunately a lot of people are falling for it.
Although the text and appearance of the various emails people are receiving vary just a bit, they all claim that either your “cloud payment” is overdue or your last payment was declined.
Either way the scammer warns that if you don’t take immediate action your cloud storage account will be deleted and you’ll lose all your files.
Of course no one wants to lose all their precious photos and irreplaceable files so it’s only natural to want to do whatever is required in order to prevent that from happening. The scammers are counting on this feeling of dread and anxiousness leading the recipients to make a hasty decision and respond to the email.
Here’s a screenshot of one such scam email that I received just this morning:
Looks pretty urgent (and scary), right? Well, there are several red flags that immediately indicate that this is indeed a scam:
1 – The email is addressed to “Dear user”. This is a common indicator of a scam email. If the email had been legitimate it would have addressed me by my actual name.
2 – There is no company name listed anywhere in the message. If this had been a real overdue notice the name of the company (Carbonite, Dropbox, iDrive, etc.) would have been prominently displayed at or near the top of the message.
3 – Although I didn’t include it in the screenshot, the sender’s email address ([email protected]) didn’t match any of the known cloud storage companies.
4 – Even though this is the first email of this nature I received, it says if I don’t take action by the very next day (I received this on December 29) all of my files and data will be deleted. No reputable cloud storage company will give you just one day to make payment before deleting your files. You will typically receive at least one reminder several days in advance, and usually more.
Bottom line: If you receive ANY email claiming that your cloud service and your files will be deleted if you don’t make a payment immediately, it’s a virtual certainty that it’s a scam.
If you happen to receive a message like this and you believe it might possibly be legitimate, feel free to reach out to me and let me check it out for you. I despise hackers and scammers and it breaks my heart when an innocent person loses their hard-earned money or has their identity stolen (both of which are likely when someone responds to these scam messages).
Bonus tip: Unfortunately it’s getting harder by the day to stay safe online. This can help. (#ad)