Is this email from Yahoo a Scam?

[Bouleversee]

I received the following email purporting to come from Yahoo this morning.



BLOCKING *** MANAGEMENT *** CENTER <laiyeman6879@tmtt.com>
To:
donotreply@yahoo.co.uk

Thu, 12 Nov at 13:05

Yahoo

Dear User,
We noticed that you have been ignoring our messages to upgrade your email. We are about to stop incoming mails to your email if you do not upgrade to our latest version within 48 hours from receiving this message.

You need to upgrade your email address immediately. Please re-login from Upgrade here
and your email will be upgraded automatically.

Do not discard, this notice is not an invoice, it's a courtesy reminder to upgrade.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Yahoo Team 2020.

*Please do not reply to this message as no one will receive it*

Thanks.
Ymail Support Team.

I don't recall receiving any such request before but my memory is terrible and I might have been too busy/unwell to notice/read/deal with or couldn't understand the instruction so blanked it out. A message search didn't produce anything on this topic, however.

Has anyone else had a similar message? It looks rather fishy to me, especially the laiyeman email address after BLOCKING ***MANAGEMENT***CENTER
and it has the tone of one of those Amazon Prime scam phone calls. I haven't the faintest idea what upgrading my email address means either. I don't feel inclined to click on the link; OTOH I am terrified by the thought of losing access to my emails. What should I do?

I have been having problems because they want me to remove my adblocker which I think is Ublock (I am embarrassed to say that I never got round to doing what ITIW Breelander advised me to do but if I can find it again, I will (help wd. be appreciated). In the meantime, they have made it very difficult to read the whole of an email and send a reply which means I have to do a lot of fiddling around, so I need to deal with that problem. I began to wonder whether my computer had been hacked but I have done a Malwarebyte scan and nothing has been found. An Avast icon has installed itself on my computer which IIRC is telling me if I click on it that my internet provider is visible to others and giving instructions which are incomprehensible to me. You have no idea how stressful old ladies who have not grown up with computers find all this internet stuff. I dread to think how many are having nightmares over getting their Premium Bond prizes paid into an online account which they don't have. At least I seem to be OK on that one. My details seem to have been transferred to the new website and this month's prizes paid into my account.

[Infrasonic]

Scam.

[PinkDalek]

Given you've correctly identified the sender as laiyeman6879@tmtt etc the answer must be a yes, that email is not from Yahoo and is a scam.

[Mike88]

You only have to see who that email is from - (<laiyeman6879@tmtt.com>) - to know it's a scam.

[Bouleversee]

Many thanks to all. We old ladies don't always have the courage of our convictions and like confirmation. Also I thought it might be useful to alert others. I shall delete it and forward to Action Fraud to put on their alerts list. I'll now search for previous posts about the adblocker and hopefully get that sorted out and then maybe I can get on with the things I was planning to do today.

[Infrasonic]

From a genuine Yahoo email header.

Yahoo <info@service.comms.yahoo.net> Unsubscribe

Ad blockers won't make any difference to spam/phishing et al.
Reporting to action fraud likewise.

You can report as spam and set up rule based filters from within Yahoo webmail settings, but to be honest it won't make that much difference as the spammers are too smart these days and get around all the defences relatively easily.

You can still use disposable addresses with Yahoo! Mail, but if your main address is already getting a fair bit of spam that's a bit horse /stable door.

You can check your email address here (https://haveibeenpwned.com/) to see if it's ever been involved in a data breach, which is a common way to end up on spammers lists and get high spam volumes.
Unfortunately Yahoo have had a few breaches over the years -- so if your account is old there's a good chance your address is 'in the wild'.

Password breaches are far rarer, you can check those here...https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

[Breelander]

....It looks rather fishy to me, especially the laiyeman email address after BLOCKING ***MANAGEMENT***CENTER...

Yes, that is proof-positive that this is 100% a scam.

[Bouleversee]

Thanks, both.

Actually, Action Fraud sent me an email thanking me for reporting it and say they will follow up, claiming that they have achieved some successes. They do have some alert system to notify people who register of current scams, including the Paypal one. I have now registered, which was a lengthy process, but may live to regret it.

[monabri]

"We noticed that you have been ignoring our messages to upgrade your email. We are about to stop incoming mails to your emai....." SCAM.

Delete the email....


(p.s. actually "Dear User" would have raised a question mark).

[Bouleversee]

It did raise lots of question marks which is why I asked the question.

[Mike4]

It did raise lots of question marks which is why I asked the question.

I bet for every person who like you decides to enquire further, there are a hundred who take it at face value and follow the instructions.

[dealtn]

It did raise lots of question marks which is why I asked the question.

I bet for every person who like you decides to enquire further, there are a hundred who take it at face value and follow the instructions.

I bet for every hundred people who, like you, is suspicious there is one that takes it at face value and follows the instructions. Still enough to make it worthwhile to the scammer though.