The IT Nerd

I got sent a copy of this email from a reader who was pretty sure that this was a scam:

Just looking at the email, it screams that this is a scam. First of all the English is pretty bad (Example: “To keep your tickets for the use of the services, we invite you to contact us on the number displayed for confirmation of your flights”). But the second thing that says that this is a scam is this:

This was clearly not sent by Air Canada as Air Canada’s email domain is aircanada.ca. Instead it was sent by an online email marketing service called Maileon. I have reached out to Maileon to let them know that their services are being used in a scam. If I hear back from them, I will post an update. What tipped me off to this was the fact that there was an “Unsubscribe from newsletter” option that actually worked.

I then proceeded to call the scammer, which by the way you should never do, to get more intel on what this is about. The first thing that happened was that I was prompted by a phone switch to press a number to get connected to an agent. That number was different every time I called. Then I was connected to a scammer who asked me for a confirmation number. As you can see from the email above, there is no confirmation number. So I was not able to go much further. But I could clearly hear other people in the background saying things like “open your Edge browser and go to this website”. That screams refund scam as this is the sort of thing that these scammers will do to steal from you.

Now, besides reporting this to Maileon, I’ll be reporting this to Air Canada. And speaking of Air Canada, they have some handy tips that you should read in regards to scams in general and scams that use their name. They’re totally worth taking a few minutes to read. Hopefully that will help you to stay safe out there.

This entry was posted on October 6, 2023 at 8:36 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.