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I received this email in my Gmail mailbox a few days ago, and for a moment I almost fell for it. The main reason was that it didn’t end up in the spam folder, nor was there an alert indicating that this email “isn’t from who it claimed to be”.

Somewhere at the back of my head, a small alarm went off. I recalled that back in the office, we constantly educate our users never to give their passwords to anyone even when it is one of us from the IT Department. After all, if these guys are the administrators of Gmail, why on earth would they need my password? Something is really fishy about this mail and I decided to click “show details” and my suspicion was further raised when I discovered that the return address is to “verifysiencsess@gmail.com” while it claimed to have come from “verification@google-editing.com”.

So, I pasted the first line of the tax into Google and did a search. There were some information on this and while the few entries I checked were quite brief, they all referred to it as a scam. That was enough for me and I decided not to take the risk. Beyond that, I decided to change the password to my Gmail account as well, even though I already had 2-step verification on my Google account. Of course 2-step verification does make login to some of my Google accounts a little more tedious on another computer, and if I forget to bring or lost my mobile phone then I’ll be “semi-locked out” of my Google account. But, I am that paranoid and there is no reason why I should make it easy for anyone even though there is no absolute certainty that my online information will be safe. Furthermore, if I am “semi-locked out”, that would most likely mean no one else would be able to access it unless they have access to my mobile phone.

I had wondered what these scammers are going to do with any account they gained access to when I received an email from “a friend who is in trouble in Malaysia” asking me to transfer USD 2400 via Western Union. I know the friend is in Singapore and not anywhere else because she has just mentioned to me a while back that she has replied to this email with the information required not long ago. That confirmed my suspicion that this was indeed a scam. The following screen shot is the email I received from my friend. The scammers eveb placed everyone on my friend’s list on bcc: to hide the fact that this email was sent to everyone on her mailing list.

So, please just ignore and delete this email if you receive one. All it needs is one person to fall for this scam and the scammers would have made more money than some of us do in a month. Pass the word on, do not let your friends be victims!

Please note that there might be a possibility that the same tactic maybe used for instant messenger [IM] (such as Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, G-Talk, ICQ etc), or even in FaceBook. If anyone suddenly asked for money on any of these plaforms citing the similar difficulties while claiming to be overseas, do not believe them right away. Just pick up the phone and call your friends to verify they are safe, and let them know their accounts have been compromised.