Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links
Scammers have exploited a loophole in Microsoft's internal email system to send spam emails from a legitimate Microsoft address. These emails, which mimic official notifications, aim to deceive recipients into clicking on malicious links. Microsoft has acknowledged the issue but has not yet provided a solution to stop the abuse.
- ▪Scammers are using an internal Microsoft email address to send spam emails.
- ▪The emails are designed to look like legitimate notifications from Microsoft.
- ▪The Spamhaus Project has reported this issue and notified Microsoft about the abuse.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/21/scammers-are-abusing-an-internal-microsoft-account-to-send-spam/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 11:42:57 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T11:51:11.072Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T11:52:10.502Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | K2XNZhwyztt0 · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
For months, scammers have been taking advantage of a loophole that allows them to send spammy emails from an internal Microsoft email address typically used for sending legitimate account alerts. It’s not clear how the scammers are abusing the system, but they have been able to set up new Microsoft accounts as if they are new customers, and use that access to send out emails purportedly from the tech giant itself, potentially tricking people into thinking that these emails may be genuine. Microsoft doesn’t yet appear to have gotten a handle on the issue. Last week, I received several, similarly structured emails containing subject lines and web links to scammy sites from Microsoft across different email accounts.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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