I knew it was a criminal’s phishing email. I could tell because the email was a picture instead of actual text.
But my Yahoo email program said “This message is verified & sent securely by a trusted sender.”
That part was true. The email shows it was from groupupdates@facebookmail.com. I checked Facebook and the domain “facebookmail.com” is a real domain they own even though it seems fake.
So I did something I never expect you to have to do. I looked at the raw email message.
I wanted to see if there was a way that I could show you how to spot the criminal lurking behind the message.
I found it, but it wasn’t easy. I’m not an email expert so I don’t know how the criminals bypassed the technical security in the Yahoo email platform, but I know they did it. I can see the real email server the criminals used. And I can see the location that the picture was going to send me to which was a domain created a month before.
I forwarded the email to my gmail account, but unfortunately the criminal’s information was stripped from the email, including the link which would have directed me to the criminal’s website.
Which means if you have a possible scam message and forward it to me, I may not be able to see some of the criminal behavior.
Let me be clear, the criminal did not hack Facebook’s email. The criminal used a technical way to pretend they were Facebook’s email. That’s also why it didn’t send the email to my spam folder.
So I’ve updated my previous article about spotting fake emails because in that article I said to make sure the email was from a trusted source. Well this criminal destroyed any hope I had of even trusted account emails being safe.
However, I can tell you again that I spotted it because the email itself was a fuzzy picture. When you receive an email that looks like it’s a picture, either because it is fuzzy on the screen or because you can’t highlight the text in it, then it’s definitely a scam.
Please forward this article to your family and friends. We all need to be watching out for criminals and keeping each other safe.