MailGuard Blog

Popular entertainment company Netflix has once again been spoofed by cybercriminals in a phishing email scam.

MailGuard urges all cyber users to be vigilant when accessing their emails as a widespread email scam leveraging on fears around coronavirus (now officially known as COVID-19) is infiltrating Australian inboxes.

Netflix users, don’t panic if you receive an email threatening to suspend your membership and prohibiting you from watching your favourite TV shows. The popular entertainment company has once again been spoofed by cybercriminals in a phishing email scam.

3-step verification is a common digital safety feature used by many established brands to protect sensitive data of their customers online. Because of its widespread usage, it is, ironically, also a popular tool used by cybercriminals to trick unsuspecting users.

As we enter a new year, it should come as no surprise that Netflix remains a favourite with cybercriminals. This simple email phishing scam is once more hitting inboxes in the first days of 2020. The email tells recipients ‘Your Netflix Membership is on hold’ with a sender display name of NETFLIX, although the emails are actually coming from a compromised email account.

Subscribers to Netflix are once again the target of an email scam landing in inboxes on the eve of the holidays. An email with the simple subject line ‘Update your payment details’ from 'Netflix Team' tells recipients that Netflix is ‘having some trouble with your billing information. We’ll try again, but in the meantime, you may want to update your payment details.’

 
A new Netflix email scam attempting to steal credit card information has been detected by MailGuard.

The scam message tells the recipient that Netflix ‘failed to validate’ their payment and that they need to log into their Netflix account to ‘verify’ their ‘billing and payment details’.

MailGuard has detected a new zero-day phishing scam using fake Netflix branding.

Netflix has become a favourite vehicle for email fraudsters. Their large customer base makes them a valuable target for brandjacking; cybercrime that exploits the trademarks of well-known companies to deceive victims.

Another Busy Week on the Frontlines of Cybercrime Prevention

There's no rest for cyber-crime-fighters. Criminals are firing out emails at the rate of millions a minute, so keeping our client's inboxes clean and safe is a non-stop job. 

Yesterday, our CEO Craig McDonald published a post addressing the notorious fake Netflix email scam that's sweeping across the net. 
Our systems first detected this latest barrage of fake Netflix emails on Friday of last week and promptly stopped the malicious emails from entering our client’s inboxes. 

You may have read the breaking story this week about the fraudulent Netflix email that’s trying to steal people’s credit card details. It's been widely reported by major media outlets like USA Today, MSN and NBC, and in tech publications like WIRED and Mashable, just to name a few.