A new scam has surfaced, called the Gmail Unsubscribe scam, where even the option to filter out useless promotional emails has been turned into a way to steal a person’s data.
Constantly, we get random emails in our Gmail inbox, whether they be promotions, government alerts, job alerts, holiday and festival greetings, and more. Of course, our go-to response for all these emails is to simply delete them.
If the frequency of these emails is too much, many of us might have noticed that little ‘unsubscribe’ option at the bottom of them. We’ve also often clicked on that as well, not wanting unnecessary emails to clog up our inbox.
But now, cybersecurity experts have warned that this very innocent option itself might be putting users in danger.
What Is The Gmail Unsubscribe Scam?
The Gmail unsubscribe scam is one where hackers essentially turn the ‘unsubscribe’ option in emailers to gain access to your email address, leading the user to another site where they’d have to enter personal details in order to confirm the removal of the subscription.
Our inboxes are filled daily with various emails that are not wanted; these include subscription renewal reminders, job offers, surveys, feedback requests, webinar invites, membership requests, review requests, advertisements, and so much more.
Now, usually these emails also include an option where the user can unsubscribe from that particular mailing list. The user would then click on that option called ‘Click here to unsubscribe’ to be removed from that particular mailing list.
However, a recent report by The Wall Street Journal claims that doing so might be dangerous. According to cybersecurity experts, there are a number of ways this option could be misused by hackers.
Cybersecurity firm DNSFilter has found that 1 in every 644 clicks on these unsubscribe links could potentially lead the user to a dangerous website. One way this happens is that it essentially allows scammers to know that your email address is a live and active one, with frequent activity.
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As per Michael Bargury, chief technology officer and co-founder of Zenity, an artificial-intelligence-agent security company, clicking on this particular option “tells attackers you’re a real person who interacts with spam,” and while it might not result in instant danger, it “can make you a bigger target in the future.”
Charles Henderson, executive vice president of cybersecurity services at security firm Coalfire, claims that once the hackers know that the email ID is used by a real person, it would lead to them to start building a profile on the user.
This profile can then potentially be used to extort money through various scams, track the user’s activity, trigger malware downloads, sell the email ID for other harmful reasons, and more.
There is also the risk that clicking on the unsubscribe links can send you to phishing pages created to extract additional personal data from the user, such as name, email address, password, IP address, and other login details.
Bargury cautions, “If the redirected site asks you for your password to unsubscribe, that’s a red flag,” adding, “Don’t do it.”
He advises that users should instead just go to the actual website from where one is trying to unsubscribe and “change your communications settings manually without clicking through any links in the body of an email.”
TK Keanini, chief technology officer at DNSFilter, also stated, “Trust is relative. I trust my email client, but I don’t trust what’s inside the email.” He further warned that once a user clicks on that link, they’ve “left the safe, structured environment of your email client and entered the open web.”
Almost all experts caution against clicking on any links that are included in the body of an email sent from someone with whom the user has never interacted or had a correspondence with before.
Some red flags that can indicate if the unsubscribe link is dangerous are:
- Link asks for login or other personal details
- Unusually stylised or large-sized unsubscribe button
- The email has strange formatting or is from an unknown sender
- Includes pressuring words like “urgent”, “final notice”, or “account issue”
- No information on the company and contact support
The best way to stay safe from this scam is just to use the in-built unsubscribe option given by the mailbox provider. Gmail presents its own “Unsubscribe” button for users to easily opt out of emails. Besides that, if the hyperlinked list-unsubscribe header is not available, then just mark the email as spam or delete it.
Users can also mark that particular sender as spam so that the provider will automatically filter out their emails. Experts also warn against interacting with emails from unknown senders or if the user doesn’t remember signing up to receive emails from them.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Business Today, Hindustan Times, India Today
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: gmail unsubscribe scam, gmail scam, scam, tech scam, gmail, email, email scam
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