Beware the Pinterest “Your password on Pinterest was Successfully changed!” Phishing Scam

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A new run of “Your password on Pinterest was Successfully changed!” phishing scam email was sent out today, and if you are a Pinterest user who knows that you did not change your password, it may be tempting to go running to the site by clicking the links in the email. Don’t do it!

Below is a screenshot of the scam. Note that the ‘from’ address is, among other things, from pinterrest.net. See the misspelling? And of course email from the real Pinterest comes from Pinterest.com, not .net, anyways.

pinterest-phishing-scam

 

You may have noticed that the images were not loaded in this email. That is because whenever you load (display) an image in your email reader, you are communicating with one or more computers of the entity that sent you the email. In this case, at very minimum, doing so would tell the scammers that the email was opened by someone. Meaning they know that they got you to at least look at the email.

In addition, in this particular email, at least of the images was specifically linked to the email address to which it was sent (the file name for the image was the same as the email address that received the scam), meaning that the scammer is tracking who is opening their email.

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This is why we always caution our readers to set their email program to never automatically display images; you can always click the “show images” button if you are confident that a particular email is legitimate, and you want to see the images.

Also remember that you can always hover over any link in an email, and your computer should show where the link actually goes. In this case, instead of going to Pinterest, as it would if it was legitimately from Pinterest, it goes to the scam site “austendeans.com”:

 

austendeans-scam-pinterest

 

But be careful, because a lot of scam email will have a few legitimate links as well, to further trick you.

As always, the best thing to do when you get an email from a service that you actually use, that is telling you to take some action, is to go with your web browser to that service’s site, and log into your account, and take it from there.

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