Good instincts. Everything about that incident stinks to high heaven: Traditional social hacking approach, the phishing site, and the coup de grace (for your computer), getting you to execute their software on your computer. (Just curious, what dialog box [from what program] were they trying to entice you to paste into?)

The one thing I'd have done differently (or maybe you did and didn't mention it) would be to try logging in to the account to verify the claim. There'd be no risk to you to try that, assuming you used your bookmarked "http://sz0130.ev.mail.comcast.net"; address (me-too@comcast.net). That would settle it right away.

"...mischief by Comcast"? That's a puzzler, Frank. Not that I trust Comcast--they throttle my video streams from their competitors but not their own, so everybody else's video suddenly looks crappy after five minutes. That's one big reason I prefer to download video rather than stream. But why would Comcast need to run a phishing scam on you? They already can get into your account and read your email and intercept your credit card numbers and shake you down six ways from Sunday without lifting a finger. Not that I have reason to think they do that, but I'm sure they have better ways to make mischief for you than an email scam.

Nah, that at least I wouldn't worry about. Better to worry about things like the failure of "net neutrality" legislation, the absence of which lets Comcast trash my video streams with impunity to punish me for doing business with their competitors. Let's focus on the crimes we know about.