Email Scam Gallery
Phishing and scam emails are becoming trickier and more numerous all the time. Every day, the arms race intensifies: scam blockers find new ways to block these emails, and scammers find new ways to get around these measures - and so the cycle continues. Scammers want your information, and they will use every trick in the book to get it.
While Drexel University tags and filters out most of these scams, some occasionally show up in your Drexel inbox before the system catches up. Some scams, via devious means, bypass Drexel's filters altogether. It's up to the user - YOU - to learn how to recognize these scams and DELETE THEM.
Tips for Recognizing Email Scams
To identify them, look for:
- bad grammar, typo, unnatural syntax
- lack of or improper use of official letterhead and logos
- missing approval footers
- broken or badly formatted images
- empty threats
- instructions to click a link or verify/reactivate accounts
- demands for passwords or other sensitive information
- suspicious links outside of a Drexel or affiliate domain (hover over them, but DON'T CLICK)
Legitimate emails can sometimes contain one or two of the above items. For example, some Drexel emails don't require an approval footer, some have innocent typos, and some use shortened URLs in the text but display full URLs when a mouse pointer hovers over them.
What you want to look for are emails that commit many, if not all, of these mistakes.
Table of Contents
The examples in this gallery are actual messages received by users. Someone, somewhere, received each one of these emails.
NOTE: As new types of scams appear, IT will update these pages as necessary. This is by no means an exhaustive list - there are many, many more scams than those appearing here.