What is it?
A "too good to be true" email is one where the sender of the email offers you something
valuable for little cost to you, for example offering you a free $20 gift card for
taking their online survey. Nobody who is reasonable would offer that significant
of a reward for every survey response. Typically, the scammers behind these emails
use "too good to be true" claims to convince you to interact with the links in their
emails. The links in these emails are malicious and are designed to trick you into
giving away account credentials, or downloading malware onto your computer, etc.
Tips for identifying "too good to be true" emails:
- Make sure the sender's email address matches who they're claiming to be. If the part of the email address after the '@' doesn't match the company they're
claiming to be, it's likely a scam.
- Before clicking on any links, ensure that they go to where you'd expect them to go. This is done by hovering over a link without clicking on it.
- Keep an eye out for offers that your gut tells you are too good to be true. In today's world it's easy to get excited about opportunities to make easy money,
and these emails are designed to take advantage of that.
- Watch out for signs of urgency in the email, such as needing to act on something by
a given date or time.
- It's not uncommon for there to be misspellings in these malicious emails, which are usually done purposefully to avoid spam filters.
