There’s a very convincing new Spotify scam doing the rounds, and it’s easy to see how some people could get caught. Like millions of UK smartphone owners, I pay a monthly fee for premium access to this popular music service. That gives me unlimited song skips without adverts, along with being able to download tracks to listen offline and other features such as High-Quality Audio and personalised recommendations.
I like what I get for the £11.99 price so I was pretty concerned when an email suddenly dropped into my inbox suggesting that I was about to lose access due to my payment not going through.
The message included official Spotify branding, logos and even the famous bright green colour scheme. My email account is pretty good at filtering out scams, and for a few seconds, I wondered if my Spotify plan was really about to be cancelled.
“We are still unable to process the payment,” the alert said. “The payment method you chose for Spotify Premium doesn’t work, so we couldn’t process your payment. You will lose your Spotify Premium subscription if we don’t have a payment method that works for your account.
Luckily, I’ve been writing about scams and cyber threats for years, so I was instantly cautious about what had just landed in my inbox.
On closer inspection, I soon spotted the sender’s address wasn’t linked to Spotify, the email also didn’t include my name or account number and there were some telltale typos and bad grammar in the copy.
These are all huge red flags but I wanted to see how the scam worked to help Express.co.uk readers stay protected.
Digging deeper, I clicked on the ‘Update Payment’ link at the bottom of the message and was soon taken to an official-looking sign-in page that asked me to log into my account.
I typed in a fake name and email address and was then directed to a page wanting more details such as date of birth and home address. The final, and most worrying step was to add my credit card details in a bid to restore my access.
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At this point I stopped and closed down the web page. Had I continued without thinking, the scammers would have known almost everything about me including my bank data. That would make it ludicrously easy to make payments online and try and steal my cash without me ever knowing.
It’s unclear how widespread this attack is but if you get a message from Spotify suggesting your account is about to be stopped due to payment issues beware.
Spotify also says that it will never ask for personal information over email, such as your payment info, password or ask you to download anything from its emails.
If you are worried about your payments and account it’s best to go through the official Spotify platform where you can check you personal data.
