If you get this email that reads something like this:
"Hello (your email address),
We are contacting you with important information regarding your Virgin Media account. Our IT security department have identified some unusual attempts to your account.
We have been made aware that your account may have been accessed by someone else. In order to help protect you, please [sign in to My Virgin Media] and provide your most recent account details.
If this is not completed we will be forced to temporary suspend your account for further verification, to avoid being used for fraudulent purpose.
Thank you for your understanding as we work together to protect your account.
Kind regards, The Virgin Media team"
It’s pretty slick, using the same background as the recent legitimate emails about call centre updates etc from the CEO. Those emails come from the email address: [email@em.virginmedia.com]
The phishing email is: [virginmedia.em@email.com]
If you know anyone who’s using Virgin, please pass the info on.
Last thing people need in these times is getting scammed.
Please DO NOT click on “sign in to my My Virgin Media”. It’s somehow pasted the hyperlink. Trying to figure a way to remove the link. without messing up the message.
I had a letter from virgin media last week saying i was one of many whose data they had allowed access to by unknown hackers, and to lookout for spam mail etc. Was not impressed, thought they should at the very least offer some compensation.
I look after the folks Virgn account and saw that email to theirs but didn’t get one to mine. I was surprised too but no point in trying to ring them at the moment with what’s going on.
There are other Virgin Media phishing attempts doing the rounds. I got one a couple of days ago which claimed that my monthly payment had failed and I should log in (via the link in the email obviously) to revalidate my payment information to avoid being cut off.
I deleted it, but out of interest I did first look at the originating email address and it was clearly not a VM address at all.
Don, in Outlook, go to your inbox and if you move the cursor over the email address/sender (don’t click though), then usually the real email address with appear in a grey pop up box just below the cursor. Other email clients may or may not work in a similar way.
There are many of these scams claiming some problem with your internet/bank account/operating system/utility on both email and phone, so one should default to treating all of them as scams. I did once get a genuine call from my bank about a dodgy transaction on my account, and they were very aggrieved that I wouldn’t accept they were not scammers until I’d called them back. (oh and don’t fall for the trick where they pretend to hang up!).
Don and anyone else interested On an iPhone with the native IOS email client app you do have to click on the displayed email sender (eg “Virgin Media Customer Service”) to see the actual originating email address on a new screen. But after gazing at it with incredulity you can just cancel out of the screen, so it’s quite safe.
I never sign into any website from a link in an email. This way even if I thought it was genuine I would go to the site from my favourites or type in the URL. A few seconds of effort that could save a lot of anguish.
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