Online Threat Alerts (OTA) - Alerting you to scams and frauds.
Hotmail - Outlook (UK) Upgrade Phishing Scam

Outlook users who have the received the "Hotmail - Outlook (UK) Upgrade" email below, which claims recipients need to manually upgrade their Hotmail or Outlook email accounts. The email is a fake and is being sent by cybercriminals to bait potential victims into clicking on the link in it. The link goes to a fake Microsoft Outlook website that steals email account credentials if visitors attempt to sign-in.

Once cybercriminals have gotten their potential victims’ account credentials (usernames and passwords), they will use it to hijack their Microsoft accounts and use them fraudulently. Therefore, recipients of the phishing email message (see below) who were tricked into clicking on the link within it and have attempted to sign into the phishing or fake website that they were taken, are asked to change their Microsoft account passwords immediately, before they are hijacked and used fraudulently by cybercriminals.

The "Hotmail - Outlook (UK) Upgrade" Phishing Scam

From: <Hotmail-login-pdate-How-to-upgradehelen@lomco.ca>

Date: 4 March 2019 at 16:58:43 GMT

Subject: Hotmail - Outlook (UK) upgrade, March 2019

Hi,

Your Outlook Account needs to be updated.

We are upgrading our server to a more user friendly one.

Note

All customers are required to manually upgrade their Microsoft Outlook accounts.

Due date 4 March 2019

Upgrade your account

Microsoft Outlook users should never click on a link to sign into their accounts, they should instead, go directly to https://www.outlook.com/ and sign-in from there. If there is something that needs to be done to their accounts, they will be notified. This is will prevent Microsoft users from visiting phishing websites disguised as legitimate Microsoft website that steals account credentials.

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