November 20, 2024 By Pieter Arntz
Tech support scammers are again stooping low with their email campaigns. This particular one hints that one of your contacts may have met an untimely end.
It all starts with an email titled “Sad announcement” followed by a full name of someone you know. The email may appear to come from the person themselves.
A co-worker who received such an email pointed it out to our team. Looking around, I found the first report about such an email in a tweet dating back to February 5, 2024.
With some more information about what I was looking for, I managed to find several more.
There is a great deal of variation between the emails, but we do have enough samples to show you a pattern which looks like this:
Subject: Sad announcement: <First name><Last name>
Sometimes the colon is replaced by the word “from”.
Then a short sentence to pique the reader’s curiosity, which often references photos. Here are some examples: