Personal Email Used For Spamming Contact Forms

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Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 1:02 pm

I'm not sure if I did anything wrong regarding baiting. But my personal email has been getting about a dozen similar emails a day:

Quote:

Hello Gladis,

I apologize that we haven't responded unfortunately we didn't get the first email. Please let us know what we can help you with.

Thank you
Carrie

On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 12:46 AM, Gladis Whitehurst <[email protected]> wrote:

From: Gladis Whitehurst <[email protected]>
Subject: question

Message Body:
Can someone contact me please. I have written before.

The "From:" name is different in every response (no, I am not Gladis), but it is my personal email that is being used to spam these forms. The Message Body is always identical. And it was sent at times that I was not online.

I bait using Firefox on my macbook behind a VPN. My personal email is checked via Chrome on the same macbook. I do not recall ever opening any attachments from spammers. A virus scan did not detect anything. I don't think they've hacked my email as all I've received are responses to contact form inquiries.

So is it just bad luck that they pulled my email from somewhere, or may I have done something wrong here? If I google my email address, I get nothing. Nada. It's nowhere online that I can find.

Of course my personal email is checked on my phone and tablet as well so it could be something there, but I do not bait with either.

My fear obviously is somehow a scammer linked my personal email to me but I don't think that is the case. Any help or advice?

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 3:45 pm

It's a joe job. You should also be getting some bounces where the spammer has sent email to a nonexistent address with your address as the return address. Examining the bounces should tell you where the spam is coming from. If he has cracked your email account, the headers in the bodies of the bounces will show that.

The spammer may have found your email address on an archived email on a mailing list, on a newsgroup post, or anywhere it might be posted on the Web. Or he may have just guessed it by splicing other email addresses.

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 12:53 pm

^ Thanks for that. I've actually not received a single bounced one. They aren't being sent from my account, so I think I'm safe. Yesterday I only had 5 and today 2 so far so it's slowing down. I think it's just a random thing, or maybe I pissed off one of my friends.

LA

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 28 Oct 2017 Posts: 1

Hi Gladis (couldn't resist)

I have been getting a lot of these too since around 10/24. Not slowing down. 100+. It's not e-mail and I doubt it's related to baiting. It seems to be spam-bot activity on website response or "contact us" forms. All wordpress. Have been doing my homework. Check out wordpress and Akismet...

"Chauncy"

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