Is this email genuine?

[RW1922]

I have received an email which states it is from Virgin Media and want to check if it is genuine. It states:

A device using your internet connection may be infected with malware

Dear Mr Ward,

You have received this email as one or more of your Virgin Media mailboxes has recently been locked due to suspicious activity being detected.

It is important that you:

a. Do a full virus scan on your device with up-to-date anti-virus software

b. Reset your password to something new, unique to this account and secure.

After resetting your password, your mailbox will automatically be unlocked after 15 minutes.

Please ensure that the above points have been completed to prevent your mailbox from being locked again.

More help and support

For extra advice, or to double-check that this is a genuine Virgin Media communication, head to our community at virginmedia.com/community, click 'Help forum' and join the conversation on the Security Matters board.

Kind regards,

The Virgin Media team

[dannylau]

Those are the ones they send out when people have this issue I believe, if the name is correct then it's genuine 

[goslow]

A ModTeam post has just appeared on the subject.

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Security-matters/Malware-letter-email-accounts-locked-mailbox-u...

[Kath_F]

Hi RW1922, 

Thanks for your post and apologies to hear you're one of our affected customers. 

I can confirm we are sending email's out to customers affected by our recent locking of email addresses. 

Please refer to the link above where there are instructions on how to unlock your account. If you are still having an issue after following the steps, pop back here to let us know and we can help further. 

Thanks,

[Tudor]

There are various criteria that should be used to determine if an email is possibly genuine. It must not, ask for money, your bank and account number, date of birth, address, phone numbers and personal details like parents names etc. All scammers want something from you, so unless the email is asking for any personal details if could well be genuine.

[Serena_C]

Thanks for the great tips @Tudor

@RW1922 - have you been experiencing issues accessing your emails? Were you able tor un through the steps as advised in the email to unlock your account?

Kind regards,

Serena

[RW1922]

Hi Serena

Yes I followed the advice and my email account is now unlocked.

Thank you

Richard

[Corey_C]

Thanks for your reply and update, Richard,

Glad to hear your mailbox is now unlocked.

Cheers,

Corey C

[Andym19621]

I received one of these emails about 10 days ago and went through all the steps to fix it. Today I got another one. Is there any way I can get more details of what type of suspicious activity is actually happening. 

[louiscar]

This is pretty much what I hoped to get however, it seems that for some reason the "activity" in question hasn't been logged.

We have to guess at it but if you check your email address at : https://haveibeenpwned.com/

If it is shown to be compromised check if the password has also been compromised. My best guess currently is that these passwords are being checked in the hope they can use your email for their scams.

It would really be so much more useful if VM would log the type of activity and report that to the user to avoid unnecessary virus scans etc.