I received a message couple of days before which claimed to be from Gmail accounts department, stating that my account has been automatically chosen for permanent deletion and I must reply with some information like account name, password, date of birth, country for verification. If I fail to so they will delete my account permanently within a week.

Just have a look what I have got.

From: Gmail <account-support@gmeasdcenter.com>
Reply-to:  Gmail <verifyscecences@gmail.com>
To:  accounts@google.com
Date: Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 5:26 AM
Subject            : Your Account

We are shutting down some email accounts and your account was automatically chosen to be deleted. If you are still interested in using our email service please fill in the space below for verification purpose by clicking the reply button. Learn more

Account:
Password:
Birth date:
Country:

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Thank you for using Gmail!

The Gmail Team

GMAIL

Some of my fiends also reported the same issue, in addition to the above information they were also asked to provide:

Please Also Include:

Operating system (e.g. WinXP):
Program and version you use to access Gmail (e.g. Internet Explorer 7 or Outlook 2003):
Your antivirus software (e.g. Norton 2007):
Any extensions, toolbars or plug-ins:

A thought struck in my mind that why would Gmail need my password, if they want to verify my account they could do it by using phone verification or some other method and why would they need the data about my operating system, my browser, my antivirus software and other stuff, when they can easily track it (and they do it for sure ).

So I gave a deeper look to the email and I found that the originating IP of the email was 41.19.212.145, and when I traced back the IP, see what got.

Tracing was done through a proxy which is situated on a server in US. So the map shows, starting from location India to the proxy in US and then to the IP which is being traced.

It was from some unknown location in Africa, now I was wondering that when Gmail shifted their headquarters to Africa and are they recruiting tribals as their operating staff.

So beware and do not reply to such emails and need not to be panic.

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