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( The email may contain the recipient’s full name, which the crooks likely obtained from any number of leaked data breaches involving companies the recipient may have had an account with.) The email will appear to look like an order confirmation for a purchase or renewal of Norton antivirus, and shows an order summary. See some examples of these scam emails below. The email appears to be a popular trick with cyber-criminals who are using the email as bait to convince recipients to call a phone number which will connect to a scam call centre. If it’s ostensibly a company with which you do business or have bought a product, use the phone number on their Web site to initiate a call to customer service, not the one in the possibly bogus email message.Email users should watch out for a series of scam emails claiming they’ve been billed for a renewal order of Norton antivirus. An email that says you’ve already paid the bill? Check with your credit card company to confirm, not their bogus phone number.Ī common tactic for scammers is to ask you to “confirm” data: “Can you confirm your credit card number, please, so we can check if the payment completed?” But you should never share your credit card info with anyone you don’t know. Instead, everyone who uses the Internet, even if just for email and chats with family, needs to be more skeptical! Don’t believe anything you get via email, text message or voicemail without confirming it through a known channel. Credit card number? Address? Mother’s maiden name “for security purposes”? Even sometimes account passwords if they’re particularly convincing. Those are a direct line to scammers in India, Eastern Europe, or elsewhere and they will connect you with someone who is trained to extract as much information as they can from you.
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Worse are those email messages that say you’ve already paid an amount like $495.99 for a year’s subscription to Norton or McAfee, offering up a phone number to call if there’s an issue or problem.
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Since people aren’t always sure what software they have on their Mac or PC, too many will be confused by these invoices and pay since they don’t want to be vulnerable to malware. How can I stop getting these bills? Dave TaylorĪ: As a general rule, any email you get that indicates you need to call, log in, or otherwise pay an outstanding bill for a product or service you don’t use is a scam.
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I tell them that I already paid but they either just send me another bill or the email bounces.
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Q: I am confused why I keep getting bills in my email for McAfee and Norton antivirus software.
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