Weird email but addy seems alright / Is this official?

[Paula777]

With my other free-trial account, the email looked like this:
customerservice@ ea.com / Your Trial of The Sims Online is Expiring Soon!
All in english with the following link to subscribe:
https://account.ea.com/myacct/view-subscriptioninfo.jsp?locale=en_US&site=eaco

Today, for my other account I got this email:
customerservice@ ea.com / Hinweis auf Auslauf des EA-Abos
All in german (well someone tried) with the follinwing link to subscribe (lol i don't dare to click it)
http://eade.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/eade.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php?/home.php.

Anyway, the email does not look official, it got all those weird letters and numbers in the text. The german is not very good, whole words are missing and it's kinda pushing you to subscribe, says if I wanna keep playing I would HAVE to subscribe..

***********
Hallo,

Das Abo von *edited* für The Sims Online läuft in 7 aus. Um dein
Spiel ununterbrochen weiterspielen zu können, musst du dich auf ‘Mein
Konto’ einloggen und das Register „Abo-Informationen“ anklicken.
Zögere nicht mit dem neuen Abo! Du kannst aus vielen verschiedenen
Zahlungsoptionen auswählen.


Geh einfach auf den „Hilfe“-Link unter
http://eade.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/eade.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php?/home.php.
*********

Is this official?
Why would they send such a crappy crappy email?

<font color="red"> </font>

 

[HoTDeViL]

it is an official mail, but i guess they used an automatic translator. i got the same mail

 

[Guest]

Just because you both got one doesnt make it official. I dont know what it is, but in these times of many scams I guess I would forward it to the team.

 

[Guest]

I didn't click on the link, instead I logged onto EA.com and opted for German language. I linked to support and online help and got the following page:

http://eade.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/eade.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php

So it does look like your second link really does belong to EA.

Polly

 

[frogger2]

I thought free trials and reactivated acounts will stay on for free for now on but after creating a sim on a unpaid account I got a your account will expire in 7 days please reactivate it here at this website wont bother with link since i deleted the link in fear of possible virus. whats up devs lol.

 

[Guest]

I'm suspicious -- on the second email, the root URL is 'custhelp.com', not 'ea.com'. That would indicate it is coming from another source. I'd second Niki's wise advice and check to be sure.

Also, make sure that the URL that displays is the same one that you see in the bottom of the browser window on mouseover. I've seen phishing emails going to odd places once you mouse over the link in the email. I think sometimes they just find unused space on a server that isn't terribly secure somewhere to dump the data temporarily.

The root URL is the giveaway, but you have to look at the bottom of your window for what displays on mouseover. 'custhelp.ea.com' is coming from ea.com -- 'ea.custhelp.com' is coming from custhelp.com.

 

[Guest]

It would appear EA-Germany has not registered the same domain names as EA-US. EA-Germany's home page is www.electronic-arts.de, and their customer service pages point to eade.custhelp.com. Further analysis of the custhelp.com domain shows that it belongs to, and redirects to, www.rightnow.com - a CRM software solution company that provides online Customer Support Management to clients such as EA. Typing ea.custhelp.com will "redirect" to support.ea.com.

From the information above, the links and the e-mail are valid. The strange numbers and characters you see may be due to your e-mail client lacking unicode support.

Your free accounts are fine - you can continue playing free after the "expiration time". The e-mails are an automated process that is part of the legacy Free Trial system. I suspect that, until EA-Land makes the full transition to the new accounting system (the EA-Land Subscription on your subscriptions page), the legacy systems will continue to run.

 

[Paula777]

Thank all for your responses / help!

It really concerned me, this was the first time in more than 3 years that EA-Germany gets involved.

I'm using Yahoo and usually I get all the Umlauts done Ä/Ö/Ü lol.

Well the should definitely change that email, the word *days* is missing, totally pushing with false information and I don't like how informal they adress me either.

HAGD

 

[imported_Founder]

This might sound cruel, but I ignore just about every EA Land / TSO email I get these days. Thereis basically nothing there that I don't know already and chances are its a phishing email.