Netflix ‘Problem With Your Membership’ Phishing Scam
The original site is no longer online; links go to the Internet Archive copy.
The claim
Email purporting to be from Netflix claims that the company has failed to validate your payment information so you must therefore click a link to verify your details or risk suspension of your account.
Subject: Problem with your membership We recently failed to validate your payment information, we hold on record for your account,
therefore we need to ask you to complete a brief validation process in order to verify your billing and payment details.Click here to verify your accountFailure to complete the validation process will result in a suspension of your netflix membership.We take every step needed to automatically validate our users,
unfortunately in this case we were unable to verify your details.
The process will only take a couple of minutes
and will allow us to maintain our high standard of account security.Netflix Support Team
What the fact-checkers found
The email is not from Netflix. It is a phishing scam designed to steal your personal and financial information.
According to this email, which purports to be from movie and TV streaming service Netflix, the company recently failed to validate your payment information. The email instructs you to click a link to complete a ‘brief validation’ process as a means of verifying your billing and payment details. It warns that failing to complete the validation will result in the suspension of your Netflix account. The email includes the Netflix logo and was supposedly sent by the ‘Netflix Support Team’.
However, the email is not from Netflix and the claim that you must verify your account due to a billing issue is untrue. In fact, the email is a phishing scam designed to trick you into divulging your personal and financial information to cybercriminals.
If you believe the false claims in the email and click the link, you will be taken to a fraudulent website that has been constructed so that it looks like it is part of the genuine Netflix site. A bogus ‘verification’ form on the website asks you to provide your name and contact details and your credit card numbers. The form also asks for other information that could allow criminals to assume your identity.
All of the information on the bogus form can be collected by criminals and used to commit credit card fraud and identity theft.
Netflix has published information about phishing scams and how to report them on its website.
Phishing scams like this one are very common and target customers of many companies and financial institutions around the world. Be wary of any message that claims that you must click a link or open an attached file to deal with a supposed account or billing problem or verify account details. It is always safest to login to all of your online accounts by entering the address into your browser’s address bar or via an official app.
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