There’s always a scammer lurking around waiting for an unsuspecting victim, and this time it involves Google’s Gmail. Gmail currently offers 2GB of free storage to all users, but an email that many have received offers users more.
The image below shows what the email looks like, and even shows that it’s coming from a Google domain (note: it’s really not). They explain that the email acts as an invitation for a free upgrade to 10GB of storage along with a free domain name. It then directs you to a site called “Gmail Upgrades” which looks just like you’d be logging into your Gmail account. Obviously you wouldn’t, you’d be giving your email login and password to scammers.
Just reading the email is enough to set off a few red flags, particularly with the grammar and lack of proper punctuation. I’d think that most people reading this are smart enough to pick-up on the fact that the email isn’t legit, but ya never know! We already talked about the billions of dollars lost to email scams due to people responding to bogus offers for money, which then leaves me wondering how many people responded to this scam?
Why do spammers always spell wrong?
It’s a good question, I can only think that either English is not there first language or they are in a big rush to send their 1 million emails out that they forget to run the spell checker!
It says it’s from google.com, but when you click ‘show details,’ does it say ‘signed by google.com’?
Are you telling me that I’m not going to get that upgrade???
That is definitely the first sign that it is spam, and so I’m glad they always have mistakes.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) we don’t have the email to check that, but I doubt they can make it signed by Google.
Maybe you’ll catch it the next time around.
I think it’s generally because for most of them, English is their 2nd language.