&gt; How on earth do &quot;normal&quot; people fall for this?<p>How do people fall for phishing scams or running malware from an email attachment? The answer to that question is the same to yours. I think it&#x27;s a combination of lack of public education about scams and the belief that the email or phone call is legit.<p>And I think it&#x27;s really interesting. A lot of people talk about &quot;infected&quot; PDFs - I&#x27;ve personally never seen that but what I usually see are:<p>invoice.pdf.exe<p>invoice.pdf.js<p>Most sane email providers should scrub that attachment (or bounce it) - however email providers such as AOL don&#x27;t. Thanks AOL.<p>I run my own email service and I get emails like these all the time [1]. And if you are someone who takes the tollway daily it could be a scary email that you open right away.<p>I do want to mention Amazon&#x27;s practices. So it appears their system glitches and spews out this email to random people [2]. This email is plain text and, at least the last time I logged into my account, has no indication that they want this information (it does say that &quot;functionality is limited&quot; but those instructions that say to login to the site and submit your information are incorrect which immediately makes me think it&#x27;s a scam - it even has typos that you would find on a scam email!). It&#x27;s even been reported that customer service says that it is a scam. However, it is real and an easy template to scam people out of their identity. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee at starbucks you can get an 800 number from a VOIP provider with faxing ability. I&#x27;ve contacted Amazon about it....and they just sent me the same email back. Thanks Amazon.
(You don&#x27;t know how tempted I am to write a cron job that faxes a copy of my drivers license to them every hour)<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;GH46n92.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;GH46n92.png</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;nadams810&#x2F;cb1a85514484c2659f1b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;nadams810&#x2F;cb1a85514484c2659f1b</a>