Is this a scam?? -

EliteData · 18 Apr 2017

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

why on earth did you even THINK of opening the email.

NEVER EVER open emails unless you KNOW who sent them and even then tread carefully.

Again provided you always take backup of your data - even if the worst had happened you could simply restore.

Also you can right mouse click without any problems. --simply disable internet connection so nothing can happen.

Again --NEVER EVER even THINK of opening emails unless you are 100% sure you know where it came from -- e.g if you bought something from amazon you'll have an order ref - so if you get an email from amazon it will have the order ref in the title so that will be safe.

If its from Banks, tax offices, local councils etc - it will 100% be a SCAM of some sort so delete without even opening it.

Cheers
jimbo

there was nothing to open because it was in his webmail formatted as HTML.
i would suggest to him that he turn off HTML formatting for incoming mail in his mail settings.

EliteData · 18 Apr 2017

jimbo45 said:

It's quite a common scam to send people to various sites for "Free this or that" with in tiny print that after x days you will be charged a monthly fee -- and when you try and cancel - you've guessed it -- there's no way to cancel online and they usually give some phone number at the opposite end of the planet you are expected to ring --of course also it's never manned.

it gets worse from there.
alot of those companies also sell the harvested data to other nefarious companies who do the same thing as the first company (and so on and so forth).
so even if you managed to stop the first one from charging you a subtle small monthly fee, it wont be long before another one magically starts showing up subtle small monthly charges on your bank account statement from another company.
its the "domino" effect, its only way worse when your full identity is stolen.
additionally, as i suggested before, i would never view any incoming mail in HTML format, its just so wrong in this day and age of cyber insecurity.

Fafhrd · 18 Apr 2017

@jimbo45 - hi mate, I did not even know it was an email - it appeared as a notification in the Action Center - and looked important - so to read the text of the notification, I clicked on it - which opened Windows Mail App with that message opened. I should have mentioned this earlier.

As I explained in the first post I don't use Outlook (Windows Mail App) as such, only webmail from my browser, so I always have a choice whether to open an email message from the list or not.

In this case there was no option not to open the email - Windows did it automatically. I was logged on to my MS account in Windows, and don't recollect if the notification had an envelope (mail) logo, it didn't register to me at the time, and of course I can't resurrect the notification to see it again. I don't recollect getting email notifications, although it is was possible - I've changed the setting now.

Edit:

As an update, I've just received another similar/identical notification on another system:

It does have a mail icon beside it, but the notification yellow bell (emoji?) is the social engineering bit of it that grabs the attention, and makes you want to click on it! Beware!

Fafhrd · 21 Apr 2017

Just to bring this to the top - I had another on a different system, and captured the notification in the Action Centre - see above post.