Now receiving threatening emails from blatant fraudster and am a little scared

new2civvystreet

Hi everyone. Ebay sent me a message to say the the winning bid on an item might have been from an unauthorised third part and to basically consider the auction null and void. Unfortunately I'd already sent the invoice to the 'winning bidder'. they've been sending me emails from 'paypal and ebay' telling me that the winning bidder was in fact genuine and that I still needed to ship the item. One I had sent a tracking reference for the shipment the funds would be released to my paypal account. Yeah right.

Sent the emails off to ebay 'spoof' address and the automated system confirmed they were fake. I think the bad grammar and english gave it away but I was kind of hoping for an actual person to confirm that I'm being targeted by a fraudster.

They have my hotmail address and todays batch of emails threatened blockage of my account. I'm really quite concerned that this idiot has my email address and what they could do with it. As most people will realise changing your email address overnight is no mean feat - especially as my mouse isn't working properly!

Has anyone had this happen to them before and it caused them more serious problems?

Thanks

allydowd

I would try not to fret.

Many of these fraudsters have computer programmes that automatically created thousands of email addresses. So their computers will create 'nonsense' addresses eg john.smith@aol.com, john.smith2@aol.com, john.smith3@aol.com and keep on creating them. Their computers then send out these emails. Some of these will, like yours, go to real addresses like yours. Some will just bounce back to them. Most of these sinners don't target anyone in particular. They don't choose individuals. They just make up names and hope that some of them will be real addresses.

When I've had such messages I've just deleted them and nothing bad ever happened in the 15 years I've had email. I don't change my email address when this happens. Unless you start replying to these messages nothing can actually happen to you or your computer. It's just like the junk mail that lands on your doormat at home; you just bin it.

ArmitageShanks

googlemail? takes a few minutes.

Just ignore and laugh, they'll soon run out of steam.

new2civvystreet

It does take a few minutes - but then I have to go through every place I have some form of account with to change my email address

Oh well, never too early to start doing that!