A friend received a spam email from quickbooks@notification.intuit.com

Intuit is a real company, and intuit.com is their real domain. Looking online, a number of people received this scam email a few months ago, and then again over the last week.

If you came across this post from Google, this is why it reeks of a scam email:

  • 12 of other email addresses are listed in the to and cc fields
  • it says that a subscription is set to renew, “$399.99 will soon be taken out of your account” and that it will happen within the “next 24 hours”. Classic sense of urgency
  • It includes an 888 phone number that does not come up as any legitimate number, and it includes a PDF which my friend did not download in case it is malicious

Does this mean that Intuit lost control of that subdomain, or is there another way that someone might be spoofing it? I can have my friend check any other metadata if it would be helpful.


If you came here from Google, welcome to the Fediverse :)

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    3 hours ago

    Very good answer. It’s really complicated since it’s an old protocol and lots of different mechanisms have been added on top. I found one small error: You can’t rely on the “received” headers either. Just the line from your mailserver and the IP and hostname right before. The rest of the path (before) can be fake, too. (And this regularly happens.)