We received a weird email recently supposedly from Verizon Wireless saying we have not paid our cellphone bill and that we need to pay immediately or they will cut off our service. Here is the beginning of the email;
Your Verizon Wireless account is still past due. If a payment is not made in full immediately, we may suspend services on your account and a $15 per line reconnection fee will be charged to reinstate your account.
Sounded weird since to our knowledge there was no outstanding balance and the language seemed iffy. However, since the email looked like it came from Verizon Wireless we thought we would check. We called them and they said they had not sent us an email, so it is a phishing Verizon email scam. Here is a screenshot I took of the email;
If you have received this email DO NOT give them any of your personal information. If you give them your bank, credit card, or your social security number they will empty all your funds. If you are concerned that you might have forgot to pay Verizon, I would check with them to confirm that your account is not “past due.”
This Verizon email scam reminds of the Apple “Verify Your Account” phishing email for iTunes I wrote about awhile ago. It is similarly well constructed as they are using a good email template to make it look like they are Verizon Wireless. A lot of the links even go to VZWshop.com and the email was sent from this domain, which is owned by Verizon.
I imagine a lot of these Verizon Wireless scam emails are being sent out right now during the holiday seasons since most people are busy doing holiday shopping. I'm sure a lot of people reading this post are getting to leave or have people visit from out of town for the holidays. Having you cellphone service turned off unexpectedly is the last thing you would want, right?
If you received this Verizon Wireless scam email and found this post helpful, please let me know. I will continue to write short posts when I get these to inform people if I know others are finding it useful. Also if you have friends, family, neighbors that use Verizon Wireless please share this and inform them. They might this fake Verizon scam email too and you wouldn't want to make a mistake.
Luckily the email scammers haven't got us this time. Of course Verizon has every month with terrible internet speeds (downtime too) and their outrageous bills. 🙂