Scammer wizards, can you help me figure this out?
Yesterday my cousin in Seattle sent me an email. She said she’s been getting these odd messages from me, in email, for months, and that she doesn’t think it’s me.
When I looked at it I can promise you it isn’t me! However, the original email comes from a Clair Harford. I only come in in the middle,in the body of the message, where I supposedly share some silly thing. What is going on? How do I fix it?
Here is a screen print. The only name that hasn’t been altered is the Clair Harford person, who Lisa says she doesn’t know, either.
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13 Answers
A scammer has sifter through your cousin’s emaIl and connections and grabbed your name. Then sent it to your cousin as if they know you, with a dangerous malicious link imbedded.
Don’t ever click on the link.
What should my cousin do about it?
Flag them as spam on her email system, and then ignore them.
One of the ways they gain emails and names if the FB connection.
I changed my FB password. Cleaned up some other stuff, too.
In this one area it kept showing me in Tulsa….I haven’t been to Tulsa in years. But, on the other hand, perhaps when I was in Ponca it’s calling it Tulsa.
Websites have a way of capturing a person’s address book & they often send out their link in your name. So if I receive just a link from a friend, I immediately block & delete the email. I then send an email to the person whose name was on the email to let them know what is happening.
I read a long time ago that IF you wanted to know if you are sending out SPAM without meaning to that you should add your own email address to your address book with a strange name & then send yourself an email several times a week to make it appear that it’s a close friend. Then when your address book is captured & sending out SPAM, you are going to receive a copy of the email yourself. When I receive an email to the strange name that I chose, I immediately send out an email to everybody in my address book warning them that I did NOT send the link that they may be receiving & to NOT open the link. I then also apologize for visiting a spam site & promise to try & do better!!! I also have a distinctive signature for my email complete with my pic. IF my signature isn’t on the email there’s a 99.9% chance that I didn’t send it.
Yes, this is a little bit different to what happened in your case; but it’s not a bad idea to add your own email to your address book with a name “Not Me”. SPAM sites do a robo capture & send so they don’t realize the screwy name & you receive a copy of the SPAM yourself & can see who all they sent it to!!!
I don’t think you can control which email account a spammer may snag.
@Tropical_Willie THANK YOU for the info. I found it enlightening!!! I have one friend from whom I receive 3 sometimes 4 phony emails every day. I recognize them & don’t open them. Still it bothers me that I get so many!!!
@LadyMarissa as they said above, just mark it as spam and you shouldn’t even see them any more. They should go straight to your spam folder and not into your inbox.
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