Guest 653- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,540
My step-daughter has had her email address compromised, inasmuch as people are receiving emails from her email address, but not sent by her.
Since Saturday, she's had email failure notices for emails not sent, and yesterday, she had an email saying thank you for contacting me, but she hadn't contacted them; this response was also sent to another contact of mine, who thought she´d gone crazy.
Any thoughts (please) ?
Roger
Guest 674- Registered: 25 Jun 2008
- Posts: 3,391
ROGER
It's probably someone trying to gret her to reply
Shes best to ignore it
and probably best to close that e mail address down and open a new one
k
Guest 671- Registered: 4 May 2008
- Posts: 2,095
It depends who her isp is for her emails, this happens alot with hotmail(msn), she needs to report it but alas once an email has been hijacked it is usally best to dump it and create new one.
"My New Year's Resolution, is to try and emulate Marek's level of chilled out, thoughtfulness and humour towards other forumites and not lose my decorum"
Alec Sheldon
- Location: Dover
- Registered: 18 Aug 2008
- Posts: 1,036
It is called "spoofing" Roger. The same thing happened to me around Christmas time. A friend of mine e-mailed me saying that his address book had been compromised and so probably all the addresses in his book would be as well. He was right. I had loads of mail returned to me which I hadn't sent.
I reported it to AOL and had a nice mail back saying that I had been "spoofed" and ways of getting rid of the problem in jargon that I didn't understand as I am not very computer literate. Sometimes I was getting twenty per day, a lot of it sourced from China. I sent it all to my spam box every time. It went on for a couple of months but has now stopped, touch wood.
Google "spoofing", there is lots of info on there about it.
This sounds exactly like a "zombie" computer, that is a computer which has become victim to some form of virus or trojan horse and is being used, without the owner's consent or knowledge, to send out spam email. It is VERY common. Here's some info:
http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/zombies.phpGuest 686- Registered: 5 May 2009
- Posts: 556
I seem to get a lot from Pfizer that appear to have been sent by me to me!!! Damned annoying but they get trapped and deleted easily enough. Definately spoof mail, but not a zombie as far as I can ascertain - my machine is clean.
Phil West
If at first you don't succeed, use a BIGGER hammer!!
Guest 653- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,540
Thanks Guys - I'll let her know.
Roger
So Phil, you're a man with a clean machine AND a mean machine eh?
