Dissecting an Email Scam #2

Posted on: May 18th, 2010

A while back I did an analysis on an email scam that came my way. Today I got one forwarded to me.

I printed this out and annotated to show the little red flags that were the indications that it was a scam, not a legitimate email.

This particular scam was masquerading as a note sent out from Intuit (the company that makes QuickBooks and Quicken). And it tried to trick the user to download some kind of software – most likely a virus.

So here’s the picture. Please click on it to make it full size.

As you can see this little one page email had quite a few red flags. The most obvious is the bad English and the typos. These are telltale signs of something fishy. A respectable company like Intuit would not send out something with a horrible English like this.

It’s actually not too hard to spot as they are full of mistakes and do not make much sense.

If you are in doubt about whether you got a legitimate notice then contact the company that the email appears to have come from by phone, or if not possible then by going to their website directly from your browser, NOT by clicking on a link in the email. Which, like in this case, would have taken you a virus ridden page.

Hopefully this will give some help for you to spot scamming emails.

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