The other day my wife received an e-mail purportedly from Microsoft with the subject:  Suspicious Message: “We are having some time trouble online identifying your… system”

She quickly identified it as a Phishing message and forwarded it to me for reporting. I needed to send Microsoft the complete headers for the message, which meant I had to get them from the message on her computer, but it was a Mac, not the PC I was used to. After some painful manual manipulations between OutLook for Mac and PC versions I was able to extract the required information for the Microsoft Abuse Reporting Site.

I took the message headers, pasted them onto the original message and forwarded them to abuse@microsoft.com .  I received a reply from Microsoft stating that the message WAS NOT from them (which I already knew) and giving me a link which contained a lot of valuable information I wanted to share with our BLOG community.  See the link below:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/safety/online-privacy/phishing-scams.aspx

If you get a suspicious message purportedly from Microsoft, your bank, some agency like the FBI, Social Security, etc.  You can always forward it to abuse@(Microsoft, your bank, etc.)  Most agencies will respond to messages addressed to abuse@(whatever agency you want).  Remember to include the full header so that it can be investigated.