Outline
Email purporting to be from Virgin Media claims that the recipient’s billing subscription has expired and the associated email account is about to be suspended.
Brief Analysis
The email is not from Virgin Media. It is a phishing scam designed to trick recipients into supplying account login details as well as personal and financial information.
Example
Your account billing subscription has expired and your email is about to be suspended,Confirm your account information to keep your email active.Click the secured link below to confirm.
[Link removed]
Thank you
© 2013 Virgin Media. All rights reserved virginmedia.com
Detailed Analysis
According to this email, which purports to be from large service provider Virgin Media, the recipient’s account billing subscription has expired. The message warns that the recipient’s email account is about to be suspended as a result.
To resolve the issue, the recipient is instructed to click a link to confirm the account.
However, the email is not from Virgin Media. It is a phishing scam designed to trick Virgin Media customers into sending their personal and financial information to online criminals.
Those who do click the link as instructed will be taken to a fake website and asked to sign in with their Virgin Media account credentials. After signing in on the fake site, they may then be asked to supply billing and contact information, including their credit card data, ostensibly to renew their subscription and avoid suspension of their email.
Alas, all of the information supplied will be collected by criminals who can then use it to hijack real Virgin Media accounts and commit credit card fraud and identity theft.
Virgin Media has warned customers about this and other phishing campaigns on its website. The page also allows users to report Virgin Media phishing scams they may have received.
Be wary of any email that claims that you must click a link or open an attachment to rectify an account issue, avoid a suspension or update account details. These are very common phishing ploys. It is always safest to login to your online accounts by entering the web address into your browser’s address bar rather than by clicking a link in an unsolicited email.
Importance Notice
After considerable thought and with an ache in my heart, I have decided that the time has come to close down the Hoax-Slayer website.These days, the site does not generate enough revenue to cover expenses, and I do not have the financial resources to sustain it going forward.
Moreover, I now work long hours in a full-time and physically taxing job, so maintaining and managing the website and publishing new material has become difficult for me.
And finally, after 18 years of writing about scams and hoaxes, I feel that it is time for me to take my fingers off the keyboard and focus on other projects and pastimes.
When I first started Hoax-Slayer, I never dreamed that I would still be working on the project all these years later or that it would become such an important part of my life. It's been a fantastic and engaging experience and one that I will always treasure.
I hope that my work over the years has helped to make the Internet a little safer and thwarted the activities of at least a few scammers and malicious pranksters.
A Big Thank You
I would also like to thank all of those wonderful people who have supported the project by sharing information from the site, contributing examples of scams and hoaxes, offering suggestions, donating funds, or helping behind the scenes.I would especially like to thank David White for his tireless contribution to the Hoax-Slayer Facebook Page over many years. David's support has been invaluable, and I can not thank him enough.
Closing Date
Hoax-Slayer will still be around for a few weeks while I wind things down. The site will go offline on May 31, 2021. While I will not be publishing any new posts, you can still access existing material on the site until the date of closure.Thank you, one and all!
Brett Christensen,
Hoax-Slayer
