A Rather Bad iCloud #Scam Email Is Making The Rounds… And It Has A Twist To It
Scammers are really not even trying anymore. I say that because for the second day in a row, I am writing about a scam where the scumbag scammer doesn’t seem to be putting in any effort into making the scam convincing enough that someone would fall for it. It starts with this email hitting your inbox:
If these scumbag scammers are trying to copy Apple’s look and feel, they’ve failed miserably. Assuming that this email which I am certain isn’t in the same star system as Apple’s in house branding guidelines doesn’t scream scam. This might:
That’s not an apple.com email address. Total #Fail. Besides those two things, I’ll point out that Apple lets you have 5GB of storage for free. After that, iCloud storage costs you money as evidenced by this link. So what the people behind this scam are trying to do is leverage the fact that the next jump in terms of storage capacity is 50GB, and that is normally a paid tier of storage that if you buy into the email is now supposedly “free”. Plus the added incentive for you to click through is that bad things will happen to you if you don’t do so. As in your files will get deleted. Which is false as Apple will never delete anything in an iCloud account. What will happen is that you will not be able to save anything into an iCloud account that is out of storage. But what’s already there will remain there.
I’m pretty sure that 99% of people who get this email will simply delete it. But as I have said numerous times, scams don’t have to be successful in volume to be successful. Thus let’s see what the 1% who click through see:
This fake iCloud website is only slightly more convincing than the email in terms of trying to copy Apple’s branding as well as their look and feel. And by the way, seeing as I haven’t logged into anything, how could this website know that my iCloud storage is full? It can’t which is further evidence that this is a scam. But let’s go down the rabbit hole. Clicking continue gets you this:
There’s this questionnaire that they want me to fill out. Why? What relevance does the following have to my iCloud storage:
Where am I
Gender
Age
Logically, Apple would already have this information if I logged into my iCloud account. Which I haven’t. Oh, by the way, this scam website makes reference to Apple’s “loyalty program”. News flash, Apple doesn’t have one. Then there’s the countdown clock to entice you to click through and do what the website wants you to do. Apple would never do that. Finally, if you look at the address bar, that’s not an Apple website as the address doesn’t end in “apple.com”. So yeah, this is still a scam. Anyway, the website once you answer these dumb questions will say you’ve qualified for the upgrade of your iCloud storage.
Yee haw.
Here’s what happens next:
You can already guess where this is going. The scumbags want to swipe your credit card details along with possibility your iCloud username and password. Let’s see if I am right:
So it appears that I am right about the fact that they want to swipe your iCloud credentials. Why I don’t know. But other than faking that this is a legitimate site, which they didn’t even try to do earlier on in this scam when they perhaps should have to make the scam more convincing, there doesn’t seem to any other reason that I can think of for this to exist. So I entered some bogus credentials into this site to get to this:
And here’s the part where the unwitting type in their credit card details so that these scammers can go to town at your expense. And look at the top right corner. This transaction is Verified By Visa and MaterCard. Sure it is. Anyway, the page has logic in it to verify the card number. Thus I wasn’t able to go past this screen. But you get the point.
In my opinion, this is a pretty unconvincing scam that maybe 1% of the population will fall for. But I guess that these guys are fine with a 1% success rate as that could be hundreds or thousands of dollars every time someone falls for it. I’ll be reporting this scam website to Google, Firefox and Microsoft which means that this website will have even less traffic.
Before I go, there’s one more thing. If you go to this site using Google Chrome (I used Firefox for the screenshots above), you get this:
Great, this is one of these scam websites that is going to be a pop up hell. And sure enough:
It seems I am correct. Just because I have nothing better to do, I will click on the McAfee one and see what happens:
It sent me to another website that pretended to scan my computer and it pretended to find all sorts of viruses. What’s hysterical about this is that it says that my phone is damaged by viruses. But I was running macOS inside a virtual machine when I did this. What losers. If I click “renew subscription” it kicks me to the real McAfee website via an affiliate link which would allow the scumbags behind this to make a few extra bucks. So in short, they are trying to get you in any way they can. Just to rain on their parade, I reported this website to Google and Microsoft as well so I can put an end to their fun. It’s the least that I can do to help keep the Internet safe from scumbag scammers.
This entry was posted on May 4, 2024 at 7:59 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Scam. 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.
A Rather Bad iCloud #Scam Email Is Making The Rounds… And It Has A Twist To It
Scammers are really not even trying anymore. I say that because for the second day in a row, I am writing about a scam where the scumbag scammer doesn’t seem to be putting in any effort into making the scam convincing enough that someone would fall for it. It starts with this email hitting your inbox:
If these scumbag scammers are trying to copy Apple’s look and feel, they’ve failed miserably. Assuming that this email which I am certain isn’t in the same star system as Apple’s in house branding guidelines doesn’t scream scam. This might:
That’s not an apple.com email address. Total #Fail. Besides those two things, I’ll point out that Apple lets you have 5GB of storage for free. After that, iCloud storage costs you money as evidenced by this link. So what the people behind this scam are trying to do is leverage the fact that the next jump in terms of storage capacity is 50GB, and that is normally a paid tier of storage that if you buy into the email is now supposedly “free”. Plus the added incentive for you to click through is that bad things will happen to you if you don’t do so. As in your files will get deleted. Which is false as Apple will never delete anything in an iCloud account. What will happen is that you will not be able to save anything into an iCloud account that is out of storage. But what’s already there will remain there.
I’m pretty sure that 99% of people who get this email will simply delete it. But as I have said numerous times, scams don’t have to be successful in volume to be successful. Thus let’s see what the 1% who click through see:
This fake iCloud website is only slightly more convincing than the email in terms of trying to copy Apple’s branding as well as their look and feel. And by the way, seeing as I haven’t logged into anything, how could this website know that my iCloud storage is full? It can’t which is further evidence that this is a scam. But let’s go down the rabbit hole. Clicking continue gets you this:
There’s this questionnaire that they want me to fill out. Why? What relevance does the following have to my iCloud storage:
Logically, Apple would already have this information if I logged into my iCloud account. Which I haven’t. Oh, by the way, this scam website makes reference to Apple’s “loyalty program”. News flash, Apple doesn’t have one. Then there’s the countdown clock to entice you to click through and do what the website wants you to do. Apple would never do that. Finally, if you look at the address bar, that’s not an Apple website as the address doesn’t end in “apple.com”. So yeah, this is still a scam. Anyway, the website once you answer these dumb questions will say you’ve qualified for the upgrade of your iCloud storage.
Yee haw.
Here’s what happens next:
You can already guess where this is going. The scumbags want to swipe your credit card details along with possibility your iCloud username and password. Let’s see if I am right:
So it appears that I am right about the fact that they want to swipe your iCloud credentials. Why I don’t know. But other than faking that this is a legitimate site, which they didn’t even try to do earlier on in this scam when they perhaps should have to make the scam more convincing, there doesn’t seem to any other reason that I can think of for this to exist. So I entered some bogus credentials into this site to get to this:
And here’s the part where the unwitting type in their credit card details so that these scammers can go to town at your expense. And look at the top right corner. This transaction is Verified By Visa and MaterCard. Sure it is. Anyway, the page has logic in it to verify the card number. Thus I wasn’t able to go past this screen. But you get the point.
In my opinion, this is a pretty unconvincing scam that maybe 1% of the population will fall for. But I guess that these guys are fine with a 1% success rate as that could be hundreds or thousands of dollars every time someone falls for it. I’ll be reporting this scam website to Google, Firefox and Microsoft which means that this website will have even less traffic.
Before I go, there’s one more thing. If you go to this site using Google Chrome (I used Firefox for the screenshots above), you get this:
Great, this is one of these scam websites that is going to be a pop up hell. And sure enough:
It seems I am correct. Just because I have nothing better to do, I will click on the McAfee one and see what happens:
It sent me to another website that pretended to scan my computer and it pretended to find all sorts of viruses. What’s hysterical about this is that it says that my phone is damaged by viruses. But I was running macOS inside a virtual machine when I did this. What losers. If I click “renew subscription” it kicks me to the real McAfee website via an affiliate link which would allow the scumbags behind this to make a few extra bucks. So in short, they are trying to get you in any way they can. Just to rain on their parade, I reported this website to Google and Microsoft as well so I can put an end to their fun. It’s the least that I can do to help keep the Internet safe from scumbag scammers.
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This entry was posted on May 4, 2024 at 7:59 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Scam. 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.