by Charles Miller

It is very rare for a day to pass without my email inbox receiving at least one scam email. Part of the reason for that is that I have admonished several widow ladies to NEVER ever click on links in emails and encouraged them to forward any suspicious emails to me. Recently I received a scam email that read like a checklist of red flags.

The "From:" line on the email contained an email address that looked legitimate enough, but the name of a sender I have never heard of. The "To:" field is often blank, a red flag, because scammers are blasting out hundreds of thousands of copies of the same email; but this one actually had my correct email address. The subject line read "Your service will be interrupted at 7PM. Upgrade to 100GB free before then." That is two red flags, first the sense of urgency that action needs to be taken before 7pm, and the second is the implied offer of something for "free."

The body of a scam email often begins with a generic salutation such as "Dear Valued Customer," or "Dear Sucker" but this one did not include that red flag. The first line though read "Storage is full. Photos, videos and Cloud Drive are no longer updating..,"this to create a sense of urgency.

Below that was a link indicating I should click there to "Upgrade Storage" which would doubtlessly take me to some scam website where I would be asked to enter a credit card number, etc. I have always preached that you should never, never, never, never, ever click on links in emails; however if you want to investigate you can hover your mouse (DO NOT CLICK!) over the link and most email programs will reveal the address of the link. I usually expect to see an obviously-suspicious address such as "russianscams.com" but in the case of this email the address was "http://storage.googlepis.com/strongcldjm..." which was quite clever. The site "googlepis.com" is a legitimate site owned by Google that allows developers to access functionalities like Google Search, Gmail, and other services. So, the cybercrooks were hiding behind a completely legitimate Google site. Google has not exactly been vigilant about keeping criminal enterprises off of their platforms, but that might be changing.

In the U.S., Americans lost more than $20 billion to cybercrime and scams in the last year. According to some sources, that number was up by 26% over the previous year. For most of this decade the U.S. federal government let this problem fester. Russian criminal forums, ransomware gangs, and services supporting them have operated with near-total impunity for years, but the current U.S. administration has tasked the FBI to do something about it.

In cooperation with the FBI, France, Netherlands, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Luxembourg have worked to seize bank accounts and limit the criminal’s ability to move money. A number of websites used by cybercriminals have had their access to the internet blocked.

You probably have never heard of "First VPN Service" because that company advertises almost exclusively on Russian-language dark web forums. Using that VPN service, criminals were able to route their internet traffic through servers in 27 countries, including the United States (California, Florida, and New York). All of those servers still exist but can no longer access the internet, meaning that for now there are millions of scam emails each day that cannot be sent.

The FBI has announced that more such takedowns will take place, as well as arrests along with more seizures of ill-gotten funds. Perhaps this means I will be seeing fewer of these scam emails appearing in my inbox for a while.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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