New Year. New Scams.

It’s a new year. And the scam emails are already coming again.

In fact, they never stopped.

Thrive HQ has received some of these. Since awareness of these threats is one of the best forms of protection, we’d like to share one of the latest.

One of the biggest giveaways of a scam email is jagged English. The subject of this email is “Today Expiration Date.” From the get-go, the recipient knew something was fishy, er… phish-y.

“Many cyber scammers are foreigners,” said Aaron Allen. “An email coming from a big-name company like Microsoft or Apple or Amazon is going to be polished. When you see awkward phrasing, misspelled words, or missing punctuation, you have a big indicator that something is not right.”

Once inside the actual email, there are other signs this is a malicious email.

“The presence of convoluted and really long URL’s is another indicator of a scam,” continued Allen. “Oftentimes, the sender’s email (or any hyperlinks within the document) lead to URL’s that have nothing to do with the supposed company sending the email.”

Indeed, in this email, the sender’s address is ultra-long. It has Microsoft terminology sprinkled in (msonline, outlook), but it even has a mistake when trying to show the presence of Exchange (echange).

One final thing to examine with this email is the logic. Check out the call-to-action:

“Time to change your password or keep current password to avoid unauthorized access…”

OK, what is it? Do you need to change to keep the password?

“Illogical action items or statements are par for the course with malicious emails,” explained Allen. “Once you see something like this, take a hard look at the email. If you think it might actually be legitimate, you can try contacting the sender via phone or a fresh email to a confirmed email address.”

It’s a new year. Be sure being cyber aware is one of your resolutions.