#email scam

Spoofed emails and what to do:

Have you ever gotten an email that says it's from your account?

Does it threaten you with the release of your personal information or naughty photos or videos if you don't do it within 24 hours?

Does this 'hacker' say that they want you to pay them money in bitcoin?

Here's how you can find out who actually sent this email to you!

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First, open up the email!

In some browsers or email apps, it may already have an option to view the 'real' sender by saying 'show original', but if it doesn't, there are ways in gmail and outlook where you can view the 'message source' or 'header data' to an email which contains all of the fancy information sent to servers regarding who sent what, when, where it went, ect.

Here's an article about email headers explained:

Now, once you figure out how to access the message source, what you see will probably not bee stuff you recognize, as I mentioned, it's mostly metadata! But there are important things you can find in there tucked away. :)

For example, this email says I sent it to myself:

Then when reading through the header/meta data...Look what I found!

In the Return Path, there is a gmail.com address, and as noted in the above screenshot, it says it was sent from gmail.com. Thus, this email found here must belongs to the scammer!

With that in mind, I copied it, the subject of the email, the header of the email (yes they need alllll of that code, not just some of it!), the body of the email (text that comes under all that code that you see in the email regularly) and reported it here to google. You can report it to outlook too (in app via 'report as phishing email) if it's from a hotmail or outlook account.

When you get threatening emails like this that says it came from your own account, make sure to check out the metadata of the email to find out who it really came from, so you can report it too!

Remember, fighting back not only helps you, it helps others bee safe, too. :)

This morning I woke up to this email

Scary right? It looks as though all of a sudden I owe over a thousand dollars to some studio I've never heard of. This would be enough to make anyone jump to correct the situation. But if you get this email or ones like it, stay calm, do not call the number, and do not click ANY of the links.

This email is fake. I logged into paypal through normal means and there was no such invoice sent to me. While obviously I didn't call the number or click the links to check for sure, this is most likely a classic phishing scheme. Essentially if you click any of the links or call the number, you will be asked for your login information in a way that looks legitimate, but once they confirm your login they will disconnect you, change your password, and have complete access to your paypal.

Transcription below:

These email scams be getting very very clever. If you can't watch the video, essentially, the scammers have set up an email that looks like it's from YouTube asking the user to verify their account and included a link to do this. The text of the link looks like a YouTube link, but the actual page it takes you to is a fake Google login that will steal your Google details. Remember, any string of text can be used to link to any site, for example:

www.youtube.com/