💧 Oh, Massachusetts, No

[2:50 AM on a Sunday is also a particularly scammy time for this to be sent.]
This past Sunday, I received an email from “Do Not Reply” with the subject line “Vehicle Registration Renewal Reminder”. Here’s what it looked like:

This is a very, very bad email, beginning with the awful A.I. slop image at the top. Here’s a larger look at just that:

Lest you have any doubts whatsoever as to the origin of this image, note that they didn’t even crop out the Gemini logo from the bottom right. While I’ve compressed the image above, the original of this needless image was also a needlessly large 760 KB png file. Awful.

When I saw this email, I was quite certain it was a phishing scam. I assumed that the link inside would take me to a scammy replica of a government website, one that would steal credit card numbers. But no! As far as I can determine, this is a legitimate email from the RMV.1 The lone link in it does indeed go to http://mass.gov/rmv, which forwards on to the official RMV site.2 And indeed, my car registration is expiring in a couple of months.

In the past, I have always received an official form in the mail which can be used to renew my registration. For many years, that letter has simply prompted me to go online to renew. Given that, a switch to email notifications make sense. They sure ought to look a lot more official than this, however.

Footnotes:

What’s most often known as the “Department of Motor Vehicles” (DMV) is indeed called the “Registry of Motor Vehicles” (RMV) in Massachusetts. Why? Just to be difficult, I assume. But we’re far from the only ones. ↩︎

I’m not sure why the original link is http:// rather than https://, but the forward does lead to a secure page. ↩︎