Beware of a Fake GoDaddy Domain Renewal Email!

So the hackers and scammers are at it again!

I just received an email today from a “would-be hacker” who was posing as GoDaddy. In this email, they were attempting to make their email look like a domain name renewal notification. They did a pretty good job of making it look like it was official.

It’s always very important for us as small business owners (and anyone for that matter) to be extremely cautious of any link inside of an email. It shouldn’t matter who it appears the email is coming from, even someone you know, you should always think twice before clicking. As you can see in my screenshot here, you can hover your mouse over any link in Outlook or in Gmail or almost any email program and you’ll see where the link is going to take you. You should never just blindly click, trusting that it is from the company or individual that it appears, you should always check before clicking. When you hover your mouse over the link it shows you where it’s going to take you. Often times the URL is very similar to the domain you think you’re going to. This is a prime example of that, you will see they are sending us to “godaddy-renewal1.info” which is obviously not godaddy.com! this is often times used with PayPal to get you to think you are logging into your PayPal account but instead you are routed to a page that looks like PayPal’s login screen where the hacker/scammer is really just collecting your username and password and emailing it to himself. They even make the landing page look like it was a mistake that you typed in and wrong and you need to try it again, then they will route you to the real PayPal and you will login thinking that you just messed up the first time. It’s quite clever but we need to be aware of these types of scams.

Click image to enlarge