Thank you! It looked iffy so I never clicked on the link. I’ll run an extra Malwarebytes first thing today. Thanks again.
I have received many emails over the years that have looked very legitimate, and the first reaction is “what the heck is going on here?” And you let your guard down and almost fall for some type of shenanigan. Sometimes I open suspicious links in a “sandboxed” environment just to see where they will take me although it is never really a good idea to tempt fate by visiting websites put up by criminals. I also have received many legitimate emails that looked very suspicious from people and institutions that should know better.
There is likely nothing in the email you received other than links which would have taken you to a fake website designed to get passwords and account names and whatever other information they can get from victims such as credit card and bank account info. These scams play a numbers game... a certain percentage of the population will fall for just about anything, so the criminals don’t have to have truly malicious code that would be discovered, reported quickly and filtered out almost immediately. There is not enough time in the day to filter out the billions of scam emails that are sent out every day that target the unsuspecting among us.
As much as 85% of all email traffic is thought to be generated by spam. In some of my own accounts this is a percentage that is close to reality. My oldest email accounts are the worst, but I hate to give them up. My wife and I have several Gmail accounts that we use to get free Google Voice VOIP “landlines” (like Vonage or Magic Jack only free). Every once in a while, I check these Gmail accounts which we have never used for email and even they sometimes have quite a bit of spam to delete in bulk. Google Voice also allows texting and it is surprising the number of spam texts. Google filters phone calls from sources they believe are scammers so we also sometimes have a lot of voice mail recordings from robocalls to delete as well. Although this is not as surprising because these phone numbers were all transferred from what were long time landlines whose numbers we didn’t want to give up. The number that gets the most of these types of recordings was my grandmother’s former number.