Online Threat Alerts (OTA) - Alerting you to scams and frauds.

Payment Declined Email Scam - How to Protect Yourself
Payment Declined Email Scam - How to Protect Yourself

There's a dangerous "Cloud Payment Declined" email scam making the rounds right now, and unfortunately, a lot of people may fall for it. Although the text and appearance of the various emails people are receiving vary just a bit, they all claim that either your "cloud payment" is overdue or your last payment was declined. Either way, the scammer warns that if you don’t take immediate action, your cloud storage account will be deleted and you’ll lose all your files.

The Cloud Payment Declined Scam

Cloud Payment Declined scam email

Of course, no one wants to lose all their precious photos and irreplaceable files, so it’s only natural to want to do whatever is required in order to prevent that from happening. The scammers are counting on this feeling of dread and anxiousness, leading the recipients to make a hasty decision and respond to the email.

Looks pretty urgent (and scary), right? Well, there are several red flags that immediately indicate that this is indeed a scam:

  1. The email is addressed to “Dear user”. This is a common indicator of a scam email. If the email had been legitimate, it would have addressed me by my actual name.
  2. There is no company name listed anywhere in the message. If this had been a real overdue notice, the name of the company (Carbonite, Dropbox, iDrive, etc.) would have been prominently displayed at or near the top of the message.
  3. Although I didn’t include it in the screenshot, the sender’s email address didn’t match any of the known cloud storage companies.
  4. Even though this is the first email of this nature I received, it says if I don’t take action by the very next day, all of my files and data will be deleted. No reputable cloud storage company will give you just one day to make a payment before deleting your files. You will typically receive at least one reminder several days in advance, and usually more.

Therefore, if you receive ANY email claiming that your cloud service and your files will be deleted if you don’t make a payment immediately, it’s a virtual certainty that it’s a scam.

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