The phishers almost had me - Beware!

The spammers and phishers are quite clever these days. I was almost caught when I received an email that looked like an itunes receipt. I am a regular on itunes, so it's very usual to receive these emails, but there were two things about this email that initially raised my suspicions:

1. I hadn't bought anything from itunes for a week

2. the email went into my spam folder.

Lots of other legitimate email had gone to my spam folder, so I initially assumed that this one had been caught up in that. On closer examination I discovered that the receipt was for "Kill Bill" box set that I had apparently purchased for $199. I knew that I hadn't and read on:

If this was you, then you can safely ignore this email. If this wasn't you, your account has been compromised. Please follow these steps:

Recover Account 

You will need to provide your billing information to verify you are the legitimate account holder.

This was the give away. I checked one of my other receipts from itunes and everything else was exactly like the legitimate versions, except for the bit I've pasted above. This was a trap to extract my personal details.

I checked my itunes account and saw no evidence of such a purchase. Then I noticed that the sender's email address was not from itunes.

It pays to be vigilant! I've changed my itunes password for good measure too.

Be careful out there.  

Have you ever been caught with this kind of con?