Not too long ago, Google announced a program where users of Gmail could pay for more storage should they require it.  Now it looks like some enterprising individual is attempting (poorly) to capitalize on the penny-pinchers among us by supposedly offering free upgrades to Gmail accounts through some phising emails that are now circulating the web.

According to 5Thiryone the emails end up in Gmail accounts and promise the following:

“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://gmailupgrades.com/Gmail-Account-Upgrade/…/
Thank You
Gmail Support Department”

That’s interesting, isn’t it?  Because all that link will do is steal your user ID and login.  Due to my security settings, every computer on my network refused to connect to the “Gmailupgrades” site (we will not link to it because of the security risk it poses) but I promise you nothing but stolen login credentials.

If by some circumstance you did get the email, did click on the link and did sign up for the “upgrade” the original article suggests going immediately to your Gmail account manager and changing your password to something different than you entered in the “upgrade” site.

A little about why I couldn’t navigate to the site is I am using OpenDNS on my router which automatically identifies phishing sites and two, McAfee SiteAdvisor prevented me from visiting the site as well.  I would also venture a guess that IE7 with phising detection enabled would also block it (though I do not promise that).

I’m left scratching my head over who would fall for such a thing but there are some very gullible people in the world.

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 2:06 pm under Google, Internet, Scams.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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