American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

I received this E-mail message today, and almost responded!

"Your E-mail account has exceeded its limit and needs to be verified, if not verified within 24 hours, we shall suspend your account."

It's a phishing scam, and it's use under all different variants of IP's (comcast. yahoo, etc.) According to this email, the recipient's account has "exceeded its limit" and therefore needs to be verified. The recipient is invited to click a link in the message to carry out this "verification" and is warned that failing to verify within 24 hours will result in the suspension of the account.

However, the message is not from your IP. In fact, the email is a phishing scam designed to trick recipients into divulging their IP account login details to cybercriminals. Those who click the link as instructed will be taken to a fake login page and told to login to verify their account. The bogus login page is designed to emulate a genuine IP sign in page. Once they have "Signed in" on the fake site, victims will then be automatically redirected to the genuine IP website. Meanwhile, the login credentials supplied by victims can be harvested by the criminals responsible for the phishing attack. Once they have procured this login information, the criminals can then access the compromised accounts, lock out their genuine owners and use the accounts for their own nefarious purposes.

Often, these criminals will use such hijacked accounts to launch further scams and spam campaigns. One such ruse is designed to trick contacts of the victim into sending money to online criminals. Once they have gained access to the hijacked account, the scammers will then send emails to all of the people on the account's contact list. These emails will falsely claim that the account holder is in a very difficult situation and desperately needs financial assistance. Usually, such emails claim that the account holder is stranded in another country without money or travel documents due to a robbery or lost baggage.

Use common sense with these types of tricks. Don't go anywhere someone says you must go until you've checked things out thoroughly. Better yet, if they don't feel right, just delete them immediately!

_________________
General Jos. C. Meyer, ACWGC
Union Army Chief of Staff
Commander, Army of the Shenandoah
Commander, Army of the Tennessee
(2011-2014 UA CoA/GinC)