If your inbox suddenly looks like it is being attacked, you are not alone. On Jan 18, developer Nick Oates said he got around 800 emails from Zendesk over about an hour, and described them as scams coming from different Zendesk instances. He also noted that quite a few made it past iCloud’s junk filtering, which is part of why this is so annoying to deal with.
The messages themselves are the kind that make you do a double take, because they look like normal customer support email threads, just for services you never contacted.
In screenshots Oates shared, the emails appear under “Dropbox Support” and include subjects like “Re: Tumblr Sign-in attempt,” plus ticket links that look like they route to Dropbox support pages. Another screenshot shows an iCloud inbox stacked with similar “request received” style emails, including law enforcement-themed subject lines and mixed-language snippets.
It looks like both @Dropbox’s and @Tumblr’s Zendesk instances are also being used for spam now too
got hundreds of emails from them in minutes
cc @drewhouston @photomatt pic.twitter.com/pSz2JBnMPq
— Nick Oates (@nickoates_) January 19, 2026
Oates’ guess is basically what a lot of people suspect when this happens. Someone is abusing support forms to generate automated replies, and those replies become the delivery vehicle for spam. In his case, he said many of the messages were Discord-related scams about “free Nitro,” and he wondered if it could be targeted because the same email had been used with Discord Support before.
But Oates isn’t the only one complaining on X. Multiple other users have also posted about these emails.
Fresh reports are popping up across Reddit too. One thread on r/phishing describes a burst of emails from addresses formatted like something “.zendesk.com,” with dramatic subjects such as “LEGAL DEMAND FROM CAPCOM” and “LEGAL DEMAND FROM EPIC GAMES.”
If this is hitting you right now, don’t get baited into replying just because the sender looks legitimate. Zendesk’s own guidance is to ignore or delete suspicious emails, and it suggests that Zendesk customers can reduce abuse by adjusting settings around how requests from unverified users are handled.
For background, this is not the first time this mess has shown up in the wild. We’ve covered a similar wave last year, where many users were seeing emails from help@gotinder, among other addresses.
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