As you probably know, the scammers of the world are getting sneakier by the day.
One of the latest scams that’s making the rounds right now consists of a mostly blank email with a line stating some variation of the following:
“If you can’t see the images below, click here.“
In all the scam emails the words “click here” will be hyperlinked to a malicious web page.
Truth be told, there is actually no image in the email to view. In short, the “missing image” is nothing but a ruse.
The entire purpose of these emails is to trick you into clicking that link so you’ll end up visiting a page on a malicious website that will download malware on your computer or mobile device.
Yes, there are settings in most popular email clients that block the display of images by default. When that setting is enabled in your email client you will indeed see a message alerting you to that fact along with a link to click to enable the viewing of images.
The problem is it’s very hard to tell the difference between missing images that are being blocked by the email client and “missing” images that were never there in the first place.
That’s why it’s so dangerous to click any link in an email for the purpose of displaying missing images.
What you can do is go into your email client’s Settings to make sure the viewing of images is currently disabled. If so, you can easily enable them in the Settings if you choose to do so.
If your client is set to display images you’ll know right away that an email is malicious if it claims to include images that cannot be seen.
But that being said, the safest course of action is to simply assume that any email that contains the line “If you can’t see the images below, click here.” or something similar is a fraudulent email. Chances are, it is.