Spam through ER?

[explanade]

Have a bunch of spam and phishing attempts (supposedly from Home Depot, Skype and other known brands but the return address is random) on the Junk Mail folder of OS X Mail.

A lot of these are recent.

The thing is, it's coming to the email address I used to register at ER several years ago.

I've not used that address anywhere else, as far as I know.

And for most of the time, going on at least 5-6 years, the main traffic was from ER, especially forum thread notifications. There were one or two spam emails during this time every couple of weeks.

But now, the activity is way up.

I will have to admit though that it's a recognizable word from a popular email provider. So it could have been discovered by spammers through brute force searching.

But like I said, a lot of the spam traffic is recent.

Anyone else seeing anything similar on the email address they used for ER?

 

[Rickt]

I got an email yesterday supposedly from IRS :

" IRS Logo

Kindly Verify your information from a 1040 tax form that you filed within the last three years.

Follow the reference below to verify your identity.

http://www.irs.gov

This information is use for identity verification purposes only

Internal Revenue Service "

 

[Bigdawg]

I got an email yesterday supposedly from IRS :

" IRS Logo

Kindly Verify your information from a 1040 tax form that you filed within the last three years.

Follow the reference below to verify your identity.

http://www.irs.gov

This information is use for identity verification purposes only

Internal Revenue Service "

Haha. Tell ya what, you send me your bank acct # and pin and I'll investigate for you. No charge. For identity verification only. And after we are done we will go ahead and start the paperwork for that bridge.

 

[gauss]

But like I said, a lot of the spam traffic is recent.

Anyone else seeing anything similar on the email address they used for ER?

Hard to say. I use a yahoo.com email address for this. Yahoo seems to be quite aggressive in sending items to the spam aka bulk mail folder. I rarely poke around there, so I don't have a feeling if there has been a significant increase or not.

I have not noticed an increase in spam being delivered to my main inbox folder at this yahoo account.

How does spam filtering work on your setup?

-gauss

 

[MichaelB]

Anyone else seeing anything similar on the email address they used for ER?

Nothing here, and I check my spam filter regularly.

 

[Alan]

Anyone else seeing anything similar on the email address they used for ER?

I don't often look at my spam folder (maybe once or twice a week at most) so I just had a look, only 3 spam messages, for the same mail address I'm registered at here, which is also registered at a large number of other sites.

 

[rodi]

No uptick here. But I used my primary email to register here- the same email I've had for coming up on 20 years.... so I get a lot of spam... which thankfully gets filtered out.

 

[Rickt]

Haha. Tell ya what, you send me your bank acct # and pin and I'll investigate for you. No charge. For identity verification only. And after we are done we will go ahead and start the paperwork for that bridge.

Yeah...I bet that' exactly what they would do

 

[Janet H]

Have a bunch of spam and phishing attempts (supposedly from Home Depot, Skype and other known brands but the return address is random) on the Junk Mail folder of OS X Mail.

A lot of these are recent.

The thing is, it's coming to the email address I used to register at ER several years ago.

I've not used that address anywhere else, as far as I know.

And for most of the time, going on at least 5-6 years, the main traffic was from ER, especially forum thread notifications. There were one or two spam emails during this time every couple of weeks.

But now, the activity is way up.

I will have to admit though that it's a recognizable word from a popular email provider. So it could have been discovered by spammers through brute force searching.

But like I said, a lot of the spam traffic is recent.

Anyone else seeing anything similar on the email address they used for ER?

In the past few weeks there has been a general uptick in scammy e-mails on the web. Regarding account security here, we work hard to keep this stuff secure and are protected by firewalls and layers of security. The details of members accounts aren't available publicly and we have no reason to believe there has been any foul play.

Stay safe, be cautious, don't click on weird e-mail links and report suspicious ones to google (report spam). They do a good job with these

 

[Philliefan33]

I've seen a large increase in spam when I access my email through either my iPad or iPhone. The spam filter on my web-based Verizon account does a better job. I just "mark as junk" and hope it will go away.

 

[Theseus]

Around the 1st of the year it seemed like there was a noticeable uptick in spam for all sorts of useless stuff peddled by those with low credibility. Guess they must have had an employee meeting and the boss did a great job rallying the troops...

 

[W2R]

Around the 1st of the year it seemed like there was a noticeable uptick in spam for all sorts of useless stuff peddled by those with low credibility. Guess they must have had an employee meeting and the boss did a great job rallying the troops...

Spammer troops? I love it! Here they are in uniform, all lined up and ready to push "send"...​

> > < <

> > < <
​

OK, I'll grow up now...
​

 

[explanade]

In the past few weeks there has been a general uptick in scammy e-mails on the web. Regarding account security here, we work hard to keep this stuff secure and are protected by firewalls and layers of security. The details of members accounts aren't available publicly and we have no reason to believe there has been any foul play.

Stay safe, be cautious, don't click on weird e-mail links and report suspicious ones to google (report spam). They do a good job with these

Don't mean to cast aspersions but there's no way the email addresses of members here were sold or anything like that?