So if you get an email or text from Norton, Microsoft, Apple, or any other company that provides subscription-based services warning you that your tech is unprotected or that your security has been compromised, do not click on any links contained within the messaging. One way to tell is to look at the return address in the email's header, which can look "phishy," as this one does in the example below: The only thing valid about the email is that it was phishing for our employee's personal information. A Hanscom FCU employee recently received an email from "Comcast," urging him to click on a link to "revalidate" his account because it had been compromised. The criminals who are scamming victims aren't always using subscription renewals as a ruse. We're happy to report that in the cases we've seen, our members shut down the conversations when they realized that sending gift cards to a major U.S. They've also asked our members to take actions like purchasing gift cards to send to specific addresses.
At this point, the criminals can ask questions that make it easy for them to do things like install malware, get access to non-public personal information, or even ask the victim to log into their financial accounts.
The fake employees offered to help enable a license key for the software, requiring remote access to the computer, something the victim agrees to. In the cases we've seen, the victims reached out to the fraudsters using a phone number from an email that looked legitimate to them. When these "employees" succeed at getting their target either to grant them a Remote Desktop connection to their computer or divulge sensitive information during a phone call, they then use the connection and information to drain the victim's financial assets. It's a fresh twist on an old scam using the start of a new year as a ruse, a time when people think about renewing subscriptions.īut it's also a typical social engineering scam designed to trick victims into sharing personal information with an "employee" of a company that seems legitimate, like Norton, Comcast, Apple, or Microsoft.
We've had several members contact us in the last week to tell us they'd been scammed by criminals posing as Norton reps urging them to renew their Norton AntiVirus subscriptions.