Are all my photos about to be deleted???

[MontyStrikesAgain]

Please could someone clever help advise me.
I've received an email telling me my cloud storage is full and that ALL my photos WILL BE DELETED FROM MY CLOUD ACCOUNT TODAY!!
The email says they've called me 3 times today and will delete my pictures.
I'm really panicking and I don't know what to do. I really adore looking through my photos, they mean so much to me.
I've got hundreds of beautiful photos of my grandchildren and my lovely daughter on my cloud. I will be heartbroken.
Can anyone advise me? It says they will all be deleted today.
I've included screen shots of the email. I hope you can see what it says ok, I haven't done a screenshot on mumsnet before.
Thank you to anyone who can help me!
I've scribbled out my email address.

They haven't called you because they don't have your number. Because it is a phishing email. Seriously, just delete it and forget about it.

Yup. Scam.

I keep getting that email and I don't have icloud storage.

I get this email fairly often.

I have zero photos stored in any online storage but I still get it.

It seems to do a countdown to when my photos will be deleted, then after a couple of days it starts up again.

I never open them, just hover my mouse over the email address which is always some random weird one then I block sender.

This is wonderfully helpful, thank you very much! I appreciate the pictures to aid my understanding of this.
Strangely, they don't seem to have an email address, it's most strange.
Who's behind this mean trick? How do they know who I am?

Righty ho. I will do then.
Thank you.

Lists of email addresses, phone numbers etc get sold and scammers just mass email them, it’s not targeted at you alone, you’re one of many type thing,

Ah so it's not just me then.
Ok then dear, thanks for your message.

This particular one is a scam, as others have mentioned

Scammers are always after your money or your login details, taking the requested payment, your bank / card details to keep on charging until you cancel, and/or your account name/email/password to go through what they can find on your account (usually to get your bank details) and to retry those details on other sites etc as people reuse passwords

So make sure you have not clicked into anything, and to be extra safe consider changing your password / enable MFA multi factor authentication (MFA can be a nuisance when you need to keep confirming it is you, but that helps to avoid others getting in

Scam. I m getting those e mails too.... It's going on months. Now they are saying your payment failed, enter payment details again. Also a scam.

I never tried to pay, there was no payment failure. Just delete.

It is definitely a scam. I don't store any photos on the cloud and I get these emails as well.

Well I must thank you all for your messages girls. It has been ever so helpful of you, and aren't you all clever to know about this.
Thank you for going to the effort of telling me about what you know, and not just passing on by.
What gems you all are.
I feel reassured now.
I think I'll go and pop the kettle on. I've been a bit worked up with worry.

They don't want your photos. They want you make a payment to increase the amount of storage you have.

They say that they're going to delete your photos today so that you panic and act quickly without thinking or showing the email to someone else.

With kindness OP, the vast, vast majority of people would know that this was a scam based purely on common sense: No service provider would delete someone's entire media archive with a day's notice. Even then, looking at the email itself, it's clearly not an email from a cloud storage provider.

But they send thousands and thousands of them in the hope of catching people who are older, or less IT literate, and include details that will make them panic into acting.

No one knows who they are except them, just horrible scammers.

They don’t know who you are. They have found your email address somewhere or used software to repeatedly generate possible email addresses and email them all at once and got lucky that yours was a real address.

They hope to find people like you who don’t immediately realise it’s a scam, so they can relieve you of your money!

Both myself and my husband have had the exact same email this week. Just delete it.

If you have photos stored on your phone and therefore in ‘the cloud’, you can go into your phone’s settings and check how much storage you have available. Then you can pay a small monthly fee to your phone company for a bit extra should you need it.

Its highly unlikely you will ever receive an email about it running out.

Similar messages can be genuine (but in this case is a scam)

My mother has had the genuine message a few times on her account, she has put down her iPad setting off a video recording of the table etc, resulting in hours of black videos being uploaded to her cloud backup

These are fixed by logging into the cloud, sorting by size and deleting all the giant videos of nothing

Genuine notices tell you that your storage is full and you cannot upload any more until you clear it out or buy more storage

Just to add, I have got a Samsung phone. It takes marvellous photos.

Your email address will have been sold on from disreputable companies and it’s been included in a blanket run of thousands of emails automatically generated and sent. Even if only one person responds, they have enough out of that. Block the sender and delete the email.
Also consider creating a new email address and use that going forwards.

@MontyStrikesAgain you really aren’t as funny as you imagine you are. 1/10 ‘Must try harder’

Hopefully someone here with a Samsung can explain how to check your storage.

Goodness. You've made me feel quite the fool.

Its a scam. I get these emails all the time.

I see. Thank you.
I will delete it now.
Many thanks.

Oh!

I've had it too.

When I've genuinely got close to maxing out my storage, I've had emails to let me know well in advance of it actually happening.
The chances are your storage is with apple, google or samsung (or another big name), and that email is definitely not from any of them.

Honestly! And people on MN fall for this kind of thread every time!

The thing to think about due to you having ‘value’ in your photos is “what if they get lost?”

In theory you already have two copies, the original photo held locally on your device and the uploaded cloud backup
Depending on settings older local copies may have become lower resolution ‘previews’ of the images

For those that are important to you consider some alternatives.
You can download to a drive, USB stick, even CD or DVD - depending on what equipment you have - but note that something could happen to them
Another option is to add alternative clouds, which can be enabled to automatically upload to multiple sources

If you are on an Apple device then your default would be iCloud and if on an Android then Google drive would be the default
Other options could be Microsoft OneDrive
All of these have a free level and payable upgrades

If you have specific images that you want to preserve then you can email them to yourself (noting that would take some space from your space allowance on your email provider -
and could be in the same cloud provision)