Aria Technology and Phishing

superscaper

So far I've only ever recieved phishing (spoof bank or paypal login emails) to one email address. That email address was unique to Aria (I use a unique email address with everyone I register with to make sure they aren'e selling my details on), so I know that the fraudsters had to have got my email address from Aria Technology http://www.aria.co.uk. I have never even typed that email address anywhere other than Aria's own registration and login pages. Every time I recieve one of these emails I try and report the email to any isp involved and I forward it to Aria seeing as they have a serious data leak problem. (and yes I consider my private information being gained by fraudsters as a serious problem). Every time either Aria does not respond or say they will pass is on to their IT manager. I can only see two possibilities, either Aria (or an employee thereof) are selling on the information illegally or they have spyware infected IT systems. Neither option makes me feel comfortable, unless someone can come up with an alternative explanation. What I want to do if it happens again is report it in some sort of official capacity but I'm not sure who and what law if any it breaks (data protection maybe).

gamma

this is very worrying if you are right that is - I shall test this out - Can we do a chain test??

PM me for a Gmail invite with your email address... register it with gmail and then with Aria - sign up for their mailing list only and lets see what happens...

hawkwinddotcom

ok i have used a unique email addy

Helix

It is very common for this scammers to just guess addresses by adding various combinations of usernames to @gmail.com / hotmail.com etc.

They may send this email out to say 500 people and find 400 of the addresses don't exist so therefore they will get messages telling them the message couldn't be delivered. From this they are able to build up lists of addresses which do exist to sell on to other scammers.

So it is very unlikely that this has anything to do with aria they have more likely just guessed the address.

superscaper

Helix wrote:

It is very common for this scammers to just guess addresses by adding various combinations of usernames to @gmail.com / hotmail.com etc.

They may send this email out to say 500 people and find 400 of the addresses don't exist so therefore they will get messages telling them the message couldn't be delivered. From this they are able to build up lists of addresses which do exist to sell on to other scammers.

So it is very unlikely that this has anything to do with aria they have more likely just guessed the address.

Normally I'd agree, I get email sent to sales@mydomainname accounting@mydomainname etc but these were very specifically spoof emails and not the normal spam and sent to aria@mydomainname, maybe I'm wrong but it seems unlikely to me the spoofers were just guessing that email address. So this isn't the normal case of guessing hotmail or gmail accounts as they'd have to be already targeting my domain name and using aria as a prefix would seem highly unusual considering every single other spam I've got to my domain name has been to obviously typical guessed prefixes, as I mentioned sales, accounting, webmaster etc.

superscaper

I've now changed the email login for aria (again a unique one for them), guess we'll see what happens. Because they're not regular spoofs, I'll only get one or two once in a while, I may not know straight away. Also even if I don't it doesn't mean my first email address wasn't gained from Aria in the first place, I still find it highly unlikely that the email address was simply guessed and first time as well!!!! No other spam, ever, sent to my domain has used an unusual prefix, this is the only time it has deviated from the normal, so what are the chances it just happens to be one of the ones I've specifically used to register with someone?