Today I received an invite to view a file on DropBox by email. It struck me as odd because it came from an email address I recognized as belonging to a fellow I met while traveling together on a tour through several destinations in Italy back in 2011. At that time we had shared photos each of us had taken and after that I had no further communication with him until apparently today.

Today I received an email from his personal email address at aol.com, inviting me to view a file with a typical DropBox HTML email invite included. I looked over the raw email but didn't see anything there that looked suspicious. I copied the link embedded in the "View File" IMG and it appears to be from [rebrand.ly], a URL shortener. One point: the invite is from his personal email, not through DropBox itself.

Is there any way I can check and ensure that this email and the invite is legit? To make this even weirder, I was actually looking through my old photos from Italy right before receiving this. I haven't mounted the drive and looked at them since 2015 so I'm really scratching my head on this one now.

Thanks for the help!

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JoeM

Sorry, I don't have an answer, but there is no way I would be opening that on my computer. When he speaks to me on the phone and tells me what he sent, maybe.

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“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in."

since you didn't talk to him in such a long time, I suspect his account got hacked and the hacker sent invites to everyone in his address book.

email back and ask him for some personal information that he would know, but the hacker would not. I expect you will not get a response.

Thanks that’s pretty much what I was thinking and at this point I’m not really willing to initiate contact as I doubt anyone would send an invite with a personal communication first. Just weird that I start looking at those photos and this thing shows up.

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JoeM

There's no reason to shorten a Dropbox link. They're not particularly long.

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Tiangou
There's no reason to shorten a Dropbox link. They're not particularly long.

That’s a good point. I actually copied one from a DropBox link and took a look and you are right.

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JoeM

Go to local library and open it . Let some old librarian dea with hackers .

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srf1957
Go to local library and open it . Let some old librarian dea with hackers .

Lol!

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JoeM