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A new breed of GMail Phishing Scams

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief October 16, 2007 · 1 min read

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I thought I have a really good eye for phishing scams but this one almost got me. Who wouldn’t be tempted with a free 100GB GMail upgrade?

The email is simple and sounds authentic:

Register your FREE domain name with Google today !

Gmail Team
Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 2:17 AM
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
Hello
Dear Gmail customer
From now if you need more than 2 GB of space use this invitation and upgrade your account to 100 GB of space also you can register one free domain name via this invitation
your account upgrade will done after 24 hours
your invitation code is : http://gmail-members.com/Gmail-Account-Upgrade/

Thank You
Gmail Support Department

Well, except for the obvious grammatical errors. I got curious and clicked on the link and the page is strikingly similar to the GMail login page.

Until I got this warning from Firefox:

Gmail Phishing Scams

*phew*

I ran this URL on IE7 and it displayed a warning page that it’s a phishing attack. However, the Flock browser didn’t notice anything wrong with it. The Flock team should really add this kind of feature into their browser.

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

8,007 Articles

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23 Comments

canada goose outlet · 14 years ago

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David · 16 years ago

couldnt agree more. you hit it right on.

Derf the · 19 years ago

Well how about this one

“http://www2.gmail.net.au/mail/src/login.php”

and where would I go to check?

Please note this site looks nice and clean;
I got to it from the best looking option (the 5th entry from the top) on the Google results page on an “extremely” clean Firefox install, so it wasn’t just results from a bad browsing record.
{Worth mentioning just because it is so hilariously extreme:
Just installed Xandros4.0 OCE on a fresh partition, looked for OO (not installed!), printed a .PS file I needed off another partition (XP had no .PS viewer native), plugged the network cable in, fired up Firefox and typed “gmail login” in the search box; now that is clean!}

Jaypee · 19 years ago

Good thing you had Firefox! Even if the URL was a giveaway, the scheme is really smart. I’m sure this email has fooled some Gmail users already. I’ve never received any Gmail phishing emails, what I got were PayPal phishing emails. :D

jhay · 19 years ago

The link was a dead giveaway. ;)

Still, 100GB of Gmail is very tempting, what’s the current space right now? A little over 3GB? Woot!

Mikko · 19 years ago

Sounds true.

I agree that gmail-members.com is enough. Nice scheme, ;D.

I can’t access the site now, probably suspended. ;D

macboy · 19 years ago

a lot of peeps getting scammed on these sites!!

http://www.spymac.com/details/?2274282

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 19 years ago

Ok, I confess. I just woke up that time. :D

Eugene · 19 years ago

@Jon, true. I seriously doubt that Google will ask you to enter your Google Account credentials elsewhere. Besides, I haven’t even filled up my 2.9 GB of GMail space. :)