Phishing Email Example

Interesting question from long-time subscriber David Netterville — looks like someone wants to get access to his email account in order to abuse it:

Hi Terry,

Can you tell me anything about this?

I enjoy your regular newsletters and this looks like something which should
be ignored.

Regards,

David Netterville

—–Original Message—–
From: Upgrade Team [mailto:info@up******.net]
Sent: April-27-12 2:46 AM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Warnning!!!

Dear Email Account User

We are currently verifying our email account Service in order to increase the Efficiency of our account features, and to delete all UN-used account from our Email data-base.

We are currently deleting all inactive email account to create more space for new accounts. for you not to lost your email account, you must reply to this email immediately and provide the following informations below to prevent your account from being deactivated from our database.

Your Full Name:
Your Email-ID:
Your Email Password:

fill the account verification form. After Following the instructions Your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Warning!!! FAILURE TO FILL THE ABOVE INFORMATIONS CORRECTLY WILL RESULT IN ACCOUNT CLOSURE.

Thanks & Regards,
Engineer.J.Williams

I wrote back to David to tell him that there’s no way that I would trust the email he forwarded.

No legitimate business would request that you send your email userID and password to them by email. It looks like a phishing attempt to me — probably to use your account to send spam.

David did not forward the email headers so that I could see them. It’s likely that, even if he do have a business relationship with "up*****.net" that his "reply" would not be going there. (They probably included a "Reply to" header that would route his reply to a different address than the sender’s email address.