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Fake Apple ID Verification Email Targets Your Personal Info

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There are a lot of scams making their way across the internet that aim to steal your personal information if you’re not careful, and Apple users are no exception.

While it may not be anything new, an email was sent to me over the weekend that claimed to be from Apple Customer Support. The email told me that my Apple ID account had been temporarily frozen and that I needed to confirm my Apple ID account information in order to unfreeze it. The reason for the freezing is because someone apparently added or changed a contact email address on my account.

So it appears someone hacked into my account and Apple is simply being the good guy and stopping the hacker in his or her tracks, but none of that actually happened, and what I merely received in my inbox was a phishing scam designed to steal my Apple ID username and password.

If you’re not familiar with the term “phishing,” you no doubt at least experienced at some point during your lifetime. Phishing is when “Phishing is when a scammer poses as a legitimate company in order to acquire personal information such as your username, password, credit card details, etc.

This email looks like an official email from Apple, but not entirely. There are a few ways to tell if this kind of email is a scam, and usually it only takes a few seconds.

Screen Shot 2014-08-10 at 6.17.19 PM

For starters, you can look at the email address of the sender. In this email it says that the email comes from an Apple.com address, which looks pretty legit, but take notice of the “via secureserver.net”. This means that the email isn’t actually coming from that Apple.com address, but rather another email address that’s masked as the Apple.com email address. Pretty sneaky on the scammer’s part.

Furthermore, when you hover over any links in the email, you’ll get a small pop-up in the lower-left corner of the browser that shows you where the link takes you. If this was an official email from Apple, it would take us to an Apple.com link. However, the email that I received links to a webpage on a site called Infolktainment.com (for the record, we don’t recommend actually going there).

Phishing scams are nothing new and they’ve been around for as long as the internet has existed. Apple is a heavy target, though, as it’s one of the most popular brands on Earth, so it’s fairly easy for a scammer to reach a wide selection of users by posing as Apple. Unfortunately, many users take the bait since they’re easily convinced that it’s a legitimate email, and they end up having their iTunes account hacked into.

The next time you get one of these emails, simply just mark it as spam so that similar emails don’t show up in your inbox again. Instead, they’ll be sent straight to your spam folder. Of course, scammers always find ways around this, like sending phishing emails from different email addresses so that they still make their way to your inbox. This can be pretty frustrating, but the more you send these kinds of emails to your spam folder, the more you’re knocking them down one at a time.

It’s also important to make sure that you give your Apple ID account a strong password with a mixture of letters and numbers in order to make it difficult to crack. And obviously never give out your Apple ID password to anyone, unless they’re a trusted friend or a family member.

6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. Cree

    10/18/2014 at 8:14 am

    Your website is the best

  2. Cree

    10/18/2014 at 8:15 am

    The best

  3. Pramod

    02/16/2015 at 1:57 am

    Make apple id

  4. Rick Hyne

    06/01/2015 at 6:29 am

    Unless you have initiated the email by some method such as a password reset, NEVER respond to ANY email requesting you perform an action.

    Ask yourself why I might be getting an email for a service I use that has advised me of a change. Did I forget to change my expired credit card information.

    If so, log-in to the service as you would normally do. NEVER respond to a link in an email.

    There is no end to various attempts to scare people into giving up their personal information, to provide access to their accounts or computer.

    This also goes for inbound phone calls.

  5. Suzanne Swenson

    02/24/2017 at 8:54 pm

    [email protected] – definitely seems like a scam e-mail:

    Apple

    Dear Apple User,

    Thank you for choosing Apple .

    We are requiring our users to re-confirm their Apple account, due to some recent updates in our server.

    To confirm your email please follow the below link

    re-confirm your account

    Thanks again,

    The Apple Team

    If you have any questions about your bill, visit iTunes Support. This email confirms payment for the iCloud storage plan.

    Learn how to manage your password preferences for iTunes, iBooks, and App Store purchases.
    Apple Apple
    Apple ID Summary • Terms of Sale • Privacy Policy
    Copyright © 2017 Apple Inc.
    All rights reserved
    1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014, United States VAT Reg. No. 8675309

  6. raymondsays

    03/05/2017 at 9:27 am

    ANOTHER PHISHING WARNING
    THEY WANT YOU TO DOWNLOAD A PDF
    Reminder : Unauthorised person has accessed your Apple ID
    AS
    Apple Store
    Beantwoorden|
    Vandaag, 18:08
    AppleStore.pdf
    87 kB

    Downloaden Opslaan in OneDrive – Persoonlijk
    Apple ID Account Locked Confirmation
    Dear Customer,

    Support team detect unauthorised person has accessed
    your account and now your account access has been locked for security measures.
    To restore your account, Read secure message by opening the attacment (pdf).
    you will be prompted to open (view) the file or save (download) it to your computer.
    for best results, save the file first, then open it in a Web browser.
    Apple Support

    Copyright © 2017 Apple Inc. 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014, United States.‏ All Rights Reserved.

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