Q: I am an AOL subscriber and recently I received what I suspect is a phishing email, informing me that my AOL account will be discontinued if I do not click on a link in the message and supply my login and other information to AOL. I deleted that email, hoping that’s the end of it, but was curious if there is more to it than that. Have you heard of this scam?
— Joan A., Stuart
A: This sounds like a textbook case of phishing.
These are popular email scams that involve fraudulent messages that pretend to be sent from legitimate sources (ISPs, power and water companies, credit cards companies, banks, amazon.com, Netflix, Yahoo!, etc.). In these messages, the sender usually claims there’s an issue of some sort with your account and the only way to fix it is to click on a link in the email you received — that takes you to a fake login screen, on which you’ll be asked to input your login information under false pretenses. Once submitted that information will be used by scammers to access other legitimate accounts you may be associated with. This is the beginning of identity theft, if you will.
You did right in being suspicious of the message and also in deleting it. Since these aren’t virus related, there’s not much more you can do besides that. Of course, if you submitted your credentials via the phony link, that’s a different story — see below for what to do. But at this point, identifying a phishing email, marking it as spam and then deleting it is the best course of…
