An email saying “Congrats!” and claiming you’ve received some sort of “Southwest Airline [sic] reward” is legitimate.
On Aug. 12, 2022, we reviewed a phishing scam that was sent as an email in which scammers pretended to be offering a “reward” from Southwest Airlines. The subject line read, “RE: __Link, Congrats! You’ve received a Southwest Airline reward You have been accepted!” Meanwhile, the body of the email claimed, “You’ve received an [sic] Southwest Airline reward.”
This was not a legitimate message from the company. The link included with the email was dangerous and should never be clicked.
The Scam Email
The email address in the message showed, “support@1785962.qaiecg5.com via nam10-bn7-obe.outbound.protection.outlook.com.” This was not an official Southwest Airlines email address. Further, the message used the word “an” instead of “a” before the word “Southwest,” and also mistakenly used the singular word “Airline” instead of “Airlines.” All of these were red flags that this fake Southwest Airlines email was a scam, as it would be out of character for a large company to make so many grammatical mistakes.
We plugged the link into the malicious URL scanner on ipqualityscore.com. The scan said that the link was “not safe,” contained “suspicious activity,” hosted malware, and was a 97 out of 100…
