Spam email?

Question

Received this email supposedly from Microsoft, but looks suspicious. This is it.. Can you verify whether it is authentic or spam?

HOTMAIL NOTICE Beginning from today, clients who have not affirmed their email record can not login to their email accounts, benevolently affirm that your email is dynamic by Sign in to approve your record.Benevolently upgrade your Microsoft account and acknowledge our terms of administration to keep away from account closure.Update NOW© 2022 Protected by copyright law. Microsoft plc.

Answer 1

Hi Ann, my name is Neil, and I'm an Outlook user like you.

I'll be happy to answer your question.

This is a spam email. Basically any email that threatens account closure unless you login to confirm your account is going to be a scam site where they are simply trying to steal your login details to your account.

The page it goes to is a flow code page which has a QR code that you are meant to scan, which I presume is then meant to take you to an account login, although at the moment it takes you back to the same page, so in a loop.

You can always test these claims by simply going to the real Microsoft Account page: https://account.microsoft.com/ and you'll see your account is just fine. If it wasn't you would have an alert here or when you try to login here.

Usually these emails will always have some sort of link in them that will probably take you to a page that looks like a genuine Microsoft website, but isn't. You can look at the website's domain to see if it is a Microsoft domain or not.

The domain of this particular link is flowcode.com which is not a Microsoft owned domain. Microsoft domains will be things like microsoft.com, outlook.com, live.com, msn.com, etc...

I hope this answers your question and explains a little bit at how to spot these spam/scam emails.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Kindest regards,

Neil

Answer 2

Is this your secure heading? ******@accountprotection.microsoft.com

And is Microsoft closing hotmail?

Answer 3

Spam/phishing mail

If using mail client eg MS Outlook as part of Office 365 the header/properties would show the real sender