an email from yahoo - real or bogus

I have received an email reportedly from yahoo mail centre at this address '[removed]'. The content of the mail is below: Dear Valued Member, Due to the congestion in all Yahoo!users accounts, Yahoo! would be shutting down all unused accounts. In order to avoid the deactivation of your account, you will have to confirm your e-mail by filling out your Login Info below by clicking the reply button. The personal informations requested are for the safety of your Yahoo Account. Please FILL IN all requested informations. Username: ……………………………………… Password: ……………………………………… Date Of Birth: ………………………………….. Occupation: ……………………………………. Country Of Residence: ………………………. After you must have followed the instructions in the sheet, your Yahoo! account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thank you for your usual co-operation. We apologize for any inconvenience. Yahoo! Customer Care Case number: 8941624 Property: Account Security Contact date: 28-01-2010 There is some bad english in the email apart from the fact that it asks about everything only what I had for breakfast. Can I presume that this is spam? Thanks for reading and in advance for any help offered. hedley

Hello hedley93,

Be confident about Yahoo!. You can be sure that no Yahoo! employee will ever ask you for your password or personal information in an unsolicited phone call or email message.

The above quote was taken from here.

Can I presume that this is spam?

Yes you can assume that this is spam. They are trying to gain access to your yahoo account. This is called phishing.

Before deleting it you may want to consider reporting it here.

Hope this helps,

Cheers,
SweetTech.

These phishing scams seem to come in waves and cycles, but can come any time and relate to any account or service with which you may be familiar. Of course, the easiest to spot are the accounts from Banks and such with whom you have no business relationship. (your account has been suspended temporarily, please contact… requires your name, password, address, phone, other identifying information) And it used to be that such scams could be spotted easily because of the sometimes hilariously poor spelling or grammar. Now, they seem to have wised up in the grammar and spelling department. And many use graphics similar to legitimate sites. If you are using a browser or browser based email service - turn on "View - Status Bar" which activates the bar at the bottom of your browser window. Then "hover" you mouse-pointer over the link or reply address provided. The "Status Bar" will often display the "actual" internet or email address to which your reply would be routed. I recently received an alarmingly realistic "temporary suspension" notification supposedly from my own actual bank. The "clickable link" was: hxxp://www.(my actual bank) .com/update=onlinebanking/redirect/update/ hxxp://(www).8clinic.co.kr/data/boasecurepage/secure/index.html <– A truly bad-guy site in South Korea! And as SweetTech points out, a reliable giveaway is - the content that they ask you to submit… passwords, addresses, phone numbers, social security #s and others for which your legitimate bank or online account would never ask, especially not via email or website.

They also include your name if it is legit, if they are like others anyway, but a great tool to aid spotting scam mails such as these is Iconix, it shows as a padlock against genuine mails from those company's that subscribe to this service, it's free to us end users, and more places are signing up daily, but eBay and PayPal and banks are among the many that subscribe, so it's a valuable tool to have.

Thanks everyone for your help. I have reported the email to Yahoo using the form in the link and deleted the email. Thanks again. Your help is appreciated, as always. hedley