I’ve had quite a few clients ask me about this lately and even a few that have lost money to it.
Let me be clear, this has nothing to do with the company called Adobe, but rather another business that is trying to make money by using Adobe’s name.
An email arrives with the title of “Adoebe PDF” (note the mis-spelling of Adobe). The text of the email, despite using less-than-perfect grammar, is still fairly convincing and informs you that Adobe has released a new version of “PDF Reader/Writer”.
So far as I’m aware, Adobe does not send out emails to users of “Adobe Reader” to let them know that there is a new version – it would be difficult for them to do so, because when you install Adobe Reader, it never asks you for your email address.
But in reality, Adobe has no such product called “PDF Reader/Writer”, anyway. Adobe’s PDF-related products are actually called “Adobe Reader” (for viewing PDFs) and “Adobe Acrobat” (for creating PDFs).
There are several links in this scam email and they all take you to a website called www.pdf-adobe.org. There’s not a lot of info on that website as it’s main aim is to get you to their sales page as quickly as possible.
However, the website does have a comparison table showing the supposed differences between “Adobe Acrobat” and “PDF Reader/Writer”. Naturally, the comparison makes out that “PDF Reader/Writer” is superior, but it is only able to do this because it completely ignores the bulk of “Adobe Acrobat’s” features.
Pretty much any link you click on for more information on this website takes you to the start of their sales process and the real laugh here is that it has a picture that says “Most trusted PDF Manager on the Internet”.
Anyway, hopefully this will save a few people from losing money via some dishonest marketing.