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Please pass this message about emails and alert your friends and family about this real danger. You might save someone from becoming a victim of online phishing.

A few hours a go I got a panic call from my friend claiming that he had received a official email from Google that said his gmail account will be deleted within 48 hours if he did not respond to the email he received. I told him to show me the message.

This is what it contained…

The wordings in this email look pretty convincing at a casual glance and as you can guess my friend was using this email as his official email address. He depended a lot on this Gmail account for his communication needs and contact management among other things for his organization. I’m not sure whether or not he would have responded to this email providing the requested highly personal and secret details in order to save his email account being deleted within 48 hours!

As soon as I heard about this email alert I smelt something fishy. Google will definitely not send a email requesting details like these. I had a looked at the senders email address and my suspicion was confirmed. The senders email address was something like acctsaccess@gmail.com. I did a Google search with this emails content and I was able to see web pages including Google support forum reporting the exact same email content sent to many other many reports of Google Alert like this email requesting confidential details.

In one of the Google support forums responding to a similar gmail account closure aleart claim a Google Employee had commented as;

edit.access@gmail.com is just a name some scammer signed up to make it look legit. Ignore these mails. We shut down @gmail.com accounts that are being used by scammers and fraudsters, not by good users like yourself.

And in another Google support forum thread I got this link a notice by Google about such emails asking for your personal details.

Here are a few ways you might recognize and take necessary actions to these fake email messages:

Messages asking for personal information - Gmail Help(Help Articles)
Some spammers send fraudulent mass-messages designed to collect personal information, called ‘spoofing’ or ‘password phishing.’…..

Reporting suspicious messages – Gmail Help (Help Articles)

Gmail Report Abuse Link (Web)

To learn more about what this email is and how to recognize them please check the above links and familiarize yourself with Google’s advice and information about such fake alerts. Who knows when you might get a fake email from a scammer.

And it won’t always be from Google it maybe from claiming yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Unilever or supposedly from a company you deal with or food court you know asking for similar personal information.

If you like this post visit Email Forwards to read and share more tips and alerts not to mention interesting emails, forwards, pictures in addition to false emails claiming tips and alerts from numerous email forwards around the globe.