Thursday, April 06, 2006

A Dell Phishing Scam?

I received an email from Dell this morning warning me the warranties on my Dell systems are expiring and they are offering extensions for a cheap price.

The only problem is I've never personally bought a system from Dell.

This looks suspiciously like phishing. A quick Google brings up a few previous attempts using Dell, but not using warranties. It is the sort of thing that a canny scam merchant would do.

The links appear to be valid, as do the half a dozen service tags mentioned. If the mail is a scam, it's a well put together one. Although it wouldn't be the first to do a very good job of fooling the likes of me.

It looks like a call to Dell is in order to see if the thing is real. If it is, I'm damned if I know how my email address ended up on someone else's service tags.

Update: It turns out to be legit, the Dell communications manager seems a bit bemused that it could have been mistaken for a phishing scam.

I'm still not sure how my email address became associated with someone else's service tags.