A long-running scam email campaign that pretends to be an unsubscribe confirmation request has seen an uptick recently. These emails should never be clicked on or responded to as they are designed to harvest working email addresses or to perform some other type of scam.

Over the past week, BleepingComputer has seen a constant stream of emails with subjects like “Confirm your unsubscribe request” or “Client #980920318 To_STOP_Receiving These Emails From Us Hit reply And Let Us Know
“.  While this is an long-running email scam, this is the first time we encountered them, so we thought we should issue an alert.

Unlike normal unsubscribe notifications, these scam emails do not contain any indication of what you are unsubscribing from and simply state:

Please_confirm your Unsubscribe To confirm your Unsubscribe, please click here or on the link below. Unsubscribe me!   Thank you! 

Furthermore, these emails come in a variety of templates, with some being more professional looking like the one below.

While others, not so much.

If you are looking for trouble and click on the unsubscribe button, it will compose a new message with the subject of “Unsubscribe”, no message body, and will want to send the email to 15 to 20 email addresses. These email addresses are for domains hosted by noip.com’s free dynamic DNS service.

It goes without saying that you should definitely not send any email to these spammers and should simply delete the email.

What happens if I unsubscribe?

You may be wondering what happens if you send that unsubscribe email. I don’t know for sure, but I do have some ideas.

Spammers create lists of “live”, or active email addresses that can be used for more lucrative email scams such as phishing, diet pills, vitamins, and loans.

By responding to the spammers, you tell the scammers that they have a “live one” and they add you to a list of active email accounts that can be used for other scams.  These email lists can then be sold to other scammers or used for their own purposes.

Knowing this, never respond to spammer’s emails and just delete them. If you respond, you will wind up getting even more spam in your inbox.

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