Suspicious email
I received an email today with the subject line “Thank you for authorizing your annual charge”. To be clear, everybody opens an email like this one especially when it seems to be coming from a well known, reputable national brand such LifeLock & Norton.
Don’t panic, your credit card will not be charged.
Here are the clues that it is fake:
- The sender email address is not from the company domain, as in ***@lifelock.com, usual it will be coming from a free email account like gmail
- You don’t have a Lifelock or Norton account
- They don’t use your name in the salutation. They will say something like “Dear Customer” . If they don’t know your name they will not be able to process a credit card.
- They create urgency. In the case of my email they said that the payment would be processed “within a few hours” and to call now if I would like to unsubscribe.
- Watch for obvious grammar irregularities
- Put the phone number provided in your search engine. If the first entry does not show the company they say they represent then you know it is fake.
- They will tell you that the charge on your account will appear as something other than the company they say they represent. Instead of Lifelock it will be something cryptic such as NTC_DV
This type of email is called a phishing email.
They currently don’t know anything about you but are trying to get you to volunteer information by contacting them to dispute the charge. Do not contact them! Delete the email. You can contact your credit card company to alert them that you have no dealings with this company and tell them what the email says.
The response from NortonLifeLock is:
“NortonLifeLock is a trusted name in consumer cyber security. Unfortunately, hackers and scammers want to take advantage of the trust we’ve built, and fraudulently use our name and branding to try to trick and defraud consumers. We can confirm this email did not originate from NortonLifeLock and we encourage consumers to be vigilant in monitoring for phishing schemes. Tips and techniques for identifying and reporting phishing can be found on our website.”
Unfortunately we live in a world where this wonderful technology is often used to hurt us but the more we know about these tricks the more obvious they are.