I saw a new email scam the other day
This may just be new to me, but while I was checking my spam folders there was an email from me in there. OK, you’ve got my attention, me.
Looking at it the email I supposedly sent it said “look! I’ve hacked your email account and am sending emails as you and I’ve been doing this for months having infiltrated all of your bank and social accounts.” The reply to and display name were mine.
I believe it went on to claim it now had a bunch of stuff on me, all my stuff was hostage, and if I wanted to get it back to pay ransom or some such. It was kind of interesting and my eyebrow might have been raised had the hacker managed to avoid the spam folder.
Being as I know display names and return emails can be faked by pretty much anyone who knows how to set up SMTP, my eyebrow didn’t raise. It was the first new scam I’d seen in a while and as such merited a little bit of attention.
If you’ve got an email from you extorting you, it’s probably not you, nor do they have access to your account. Probably. Alternately a time traveling or parallel universe you is extorting you.
A quick look at the email headers showed it’d come from some random server in Ohio. The reply-to was my email address, but the SMTP server was not. They’d just sent out a slew of emails with the reply addresses and display names of people.
It was interesting to me. Spam phishing.
