🚨 This is a targeted scam because all of the scam recipients have SBCGlobal emails. There haven't been any reported hacking events on SBCGlobal or Yahoo Mail (through which SBCGlobal is hosted), but we still recommend that you take some precautions if you or your loved ones have this email.
🕵🏼 How to tell:
- The sender's email does not have an amazon.com domain. Instead, it has an @thealternativedaily.com domain. Upon investigation, we learned that thealternativedaily.com is a health & wellness website that also sends out newsletters to their subscribers. If you don't recall subscribing to their articles, follow the steps outlined below to stop receiving emails from this company.
- This also indicates that everyone targeted has sbcglobal.net emails, which suggests that it's a more targeted scam.
- The greeting isn't personalized. Legitimate companies will always use personalized greetings using your email address/name. This particular scammer didn't even attempt to use "Dear Customer" or "To Premium User" to make the communication more personal.
- The wording is odd. Although there isn't an obvious grammatical error, the wording of this paragraph is a bit unusual, which is not typical in legitimate emails.
- The call-to-action has a sense of urgency. Legitimate emails rarely communicate in such a tone.
🔒 Ways to stay safe:
- 🚨 Change your email password. While this may be a hassle, it's best practice to change the passwords of any accounts that *may* have been compromised.
- Mark the email as Spam/Junk on your mailbox to prevent the same sender to send more scam emails to your address.
- Never click on a link from a sender whose identity you cannot verify.
- Notify your loved ones who use an sbcglobal.net email.
Ferrona recently received the exact same email to her @gmail.com email, which means that other email domains (@gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @att.net, etc.) are equally prone to targeted scams. Therefore, always stay vigilant, even if this one might not directly impact you.
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