Strange emails

baser999

Mums in a care home but still has an email account with BT which we access every other day as she still receives the occasional email. Suddenly, over the past few days, there’s been perhaps 20-30 emails from Email Administrator <postmaster@btinternet> with similar headings ‘Email system error - returned email with subject: Your contact details - (all with someone’s name) All come with two attachments which don’t open. 

What’s generated these? For now we’ve deleted and blocked and there’s only been two emails arrive overnight so perhaps the problems gone away?

Devongardener

Don’t click on any links on emails you don’t recognise!  The email Admin address can easily be cloned by scammers.  Even if the links don’t open it’s potentially dangerous.   The fact that you’ve blocked them but have had more, suggests they are coming from multiple sources.
Contact BT directly, preferably by phone, hopefully you have POA to enable them to speak to you.

Make a note of any regular, genuine email contacts then close the account and open a new one with Gmail and let the contacts know.

DullGreyGuy

Its one of three things:

1) The computer accessing her email account is compromised and is sending out spam/pishing using her account

2) Someone is spoofing her account as the sender of spam/phishing and any bounces will come back to her inbox

3) These are someone spoofing the postmaster account and it's a phishing attempt against you


There have been periods where I've gotten a couple of hundred such bounces a day which was caused by 2. When opening the bounced message it was saying "I" had put a trojan on their computer, had recorded them watching !!!!!! and would send the video to their contact lists in 5 days if I didn't receive $2k in bitcoin followed by a helpful series of points on how to actually buy and send bitcoin.

It wasn't being sent from our computers and there is little that can be done at our end to stop spoofing. You just have to hope others have got properly set up mail servers that check the source of a mail matches up to the sender.