“trully” is not a word.
“a unpaid bill” is not correct grammar.
“in the find attached” is not anything that makes sense.
However, what all those grammatical curiosities are, are clues that you’re looking at an email that may not be all it’s claiming to be.
In the past two weeks we’ve received a sudden barrage of presumably ill-intentioned spam. Why “presumably”? Because here at the office we’re well versed enough to know not to click on links in suspicious emails, or to download suspicious files. We’re not certain exactly what would happened if we clicked on the links in these, or downloaded the attached files, but trust that nothing good would come of it.
The trick for all of you is to be hyper-aware of what’s happening in your inbox these days. So many people out there are up to no good, and are actively trying to infiltrate your computer one way or another. These screenshots might be of phishing emails, where the links take you to forms where you enter personal data, which the scammers then use to either steal your identity or break into your legitimate accounts. The attached files these emails are prompting us to download could be malware, spyware, adware, or any other sort of “ware” that we very much don’t want on our computers, or smartphones.
Conceptually the emails may be legitimate, it’s possible I missed a FedEx delivery, or owe a fee for traveling on an EZ Pass-enabled highway, but the fact is, this isn’t how either FedEx or EZ Pass communicate these events. Grammatically dubious emails from visually similar, yet not legitimate email addresses are the first key that something’s amiss. An equally big clue is getting an email about paying off a school debt, when you don’t actually even have any school debt.
DO NOT LET YOUR CURIOSITY GET THE BETTER OF YOU.
• Do not click on the link to see what school debt somebody thinks you might owe.
• Do not download the alleged EZ Pass invoice.
• Do not click on links to “fix your Citibank account access” immediately.
Instead, just DELETE the email, and get on with your life.
If you think there’s a chance the email might be legitimate, take some time and do your research. Call FedEx or EZ Pass or whoever sent the email to check its validity. Alternately go to a service provider’s website and login to your account (by entering the URL into your browser, NOT by clicking on a link in one of these emails, no matter how real it looks): you’ll find all the info you need right there. If your login or account data is legitimately compromised, the login process will lead you through resetting your credentials.
Trust us, this is all too common a problem these days, and while we love helping our customers, we love it more when their data and devices are secure from threats and malicious software. With a little extra attention to your inbox, you can easily avoid potential downtime, identity theft, data loss and expensive service fees.
If it’s too late and you downloaded files like this or clicked on these type of links, and you find your Mac behaving strangely, don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll eradicate the problem and safeguard your data as best we can from future problems.
Stay safe and be smart out there.
