Scam emails - site security in question?

Nargleblast

A question for all those techie bods out there. Has anyone been receiving scam emails, either of the moneymaking scheme type (eg there's £100,000/$ in a bank account with your name on it, click here) or emails supposedly from some foreign person, usually female, looking for romance, as if they were using a dating agency?

Recently we have been getting a few of these emails, and are at a loss as to how these people got hold of our email address? My OH does a lot of ebaying, but reckons the ebay site is secure, so he is pointing the finger at my time spent perusing the MSE forums. He thinks when I log in I somehow open a portal for all sorts of unwanted stuff to come into our mailbox. Is that likely?

Any ideas as to how these emails get through and what we can do about it?

fwor

The security of the MSE website was breached a few months ago, but it was never made really clear how much user data the culprits got away with. However, there is nothing you can do about that retrospectively, other than to make some assumptions about whether it's likely to happen again (unlikely, IMO).

Have you tried googling to see whether your email address appears in the clear anywhere on the internet? If so, then it will regularly be picked up by the webcrawlers that spammers use. Again, nothing you can do about that other than changing your email address.

jayme1

spam is spam, if it goes in your junk mail box then who cares, what I can say is you cannot stop it but that is what the junk folder is there for. just imagine how useful it would be if your house letterbox had a junk folder

the scammers get your email from anywhere and everywhere, they will even guess emails, steal them, buy them from any site you have entered it, or if their 'bots' (while signing up for fake email accounts) come accross an address that is taken then they know that email exists so will spam it.

just remember the important rules of spam email

1. never reply to spam email!!!!
2. never click on any link inside a spam message
3. never choose the option to 'display images' of the spam email in your email client (webmail or program)
4. never do what a spam email says!!!

also you havent said what email account it is (hotmail, gmail, ISP?) also if any junk get into your inbox just 'mark it as junk'

Nargleblast

Thank you both for your replies. We already divert this stuff into a junk mail folder. but it is still annoying. I will try "googling" our email address out of curiosity. It's interesting to see that even email addresses are considered worth nicking! I suppose nothing is totally safe and secure in this world.

debitcardmayhem

I have been a member since dec 2009 i think, look left <

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to confirm , and the email I use here has never had a spam mail from anywhere. So put his mind at rest it probably is not from(Edited:- sourced, rather than, from) here. I would suggest not googling your email cos that will end up on their saved searches. Set up various email address using free mail providers so you can check where they come from (very approx since my main email site gets lots of spam caused by friends not being so cautious :mad:)

aerostar

You and/or your friends are the source of your e-mail address being got by spammers.

I bet you/your friends forward e-mails to lots of people using the "to" in the e-mail program, so the list of recipients is in plain view, your friends then foward this to their friends using the "to" again, and so on, it only needs one of the people in the chain to get compromised by a virus which looks for e-mail addresses and your sunk !

You should (must) learn to use the BCC setting when sending the same e-mail to multiple people, and if you get e-mails with multiple addresses, and you want to forward, delete the e-mail addresses first.

If you work for a company and do the forwarding on their computers without BCC, you/your company could be liable to prosecution for breaching the Data Protection Act !

It only needs an e-mail with 10 recipients to be forwarded 3 times for your addressees to be on 1000 computers.

fwor

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

I would suggest not googling your email cos that will end up on their saved searches.

That's a very good point, and one I'd forgotten about. If you want to do that search, put the first and last parts of your email address into google (or whatever other search tool you prefer) and omit the @ sign in the middle.

John_Gray

fwor wrote: »

That's a very good point, and one I'd forgotten about. If you want to do that search, put the first and last parts of your email address into google (or whatever other search tool you prefer) and omit the @ sign in the middle.

And not simply put the whole email address in "double quotes"? As in "OP@domain.co.uk"?

birkee

ebay and hotmail seem to be very common links to people complaining about spam. Can't remember the the last time I had one.

Tip: Have an email address, for private use only !!
Create a second address for using at all other times (on - line), and when the spammers get hold of THAT, you change it!
You don't have to advise friends and family of changes of email address then.

p.s. As advised above.
DO NOT !!!!!!!! circulate emails to friends and family etc. You pass out ALL of of their addresses to anyone they are sent to. (or, the world at large in other words.)
Learn to send 'blind carbon copies' for emails to several family members. If you Brother has your Sisters email address, neither of them will want everybody else you email to have them too.

birkee

Last circulated email I had from a family member, was a hoax virus / trojan warning.
It came from Redditch Hospital, via Worcester Social Services, to my family member.
It resulted in me receiving the email addresses of all staff and patients of the cancer treatment unit of Redditch Hospital. That was forwarded again to a colleague in Worcester Social Services, and all their colleagues and clients email addresses were added too, before it went to my family member, and hence to me.

So much for the Data Protection Act! DON'T CIRCULATE EMAILS unless you know what you are doing!

Nargleblast

Thanks everyone for your input - scary stuff going on, I see! Will take on board the warnings about circulating/forwarding emails, (not that we do that anyway, and any emailing done at work is done internally on a very secure system with limited access) - useful to know. Certainly I don't think it is anything to do with this site or ebay, probably a case of random scanning for addresses. A few years back we received a virus because someone I emailed once then got a virus which targeted everyone on their address book - we ended up having to totally wipe the hard drive (with the help of the systems support dept of the company we bought the system from). That was a total pain in the neck. We will consider setting up a separate address for private use.

Once again, many thanks.