My email forged!

J

johngalt

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Joined
Feb 27, 2006
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492
I received a returned email that has forged headers in it. The email, using my email was sent to mattdtactical.com for unknown reasons. Being that the recipient is in the knife business, it leads me to believe that my email has been grabbed from the BladeForums and would encourage the other members to be aware that this could have occured to them.
I will continue to investigate and will keep the mods and members up to date as to what I find. Someone done f***** with the wrong person.
 
Even when you have your email turned on, the forum software doesn't allow anyone to see your email address, so I don't know how anyone could have gotten your address from Bladeforums.
 
Right, it's not possible for anyone to get your email address from Bladeforums. Try sending somebody an email and you'll see for yourself; the system sends it without showing you the address.

Is it a virus? A number of viruses take addresses from the Outlook address book of the computer they infect and put them in the from field.
 
It was actually lifted from your ISP's mail server. Happens all the time. It is one of the ways spammers mine for email addresses.
 
Knife Outlet said:
It was actually lifted from your ISP's mail server. Happens all the time. It is one of the ways spammers mine for email addresses.
Click to expand...
Not unless his ISP has mind-bogglingly badly configured, and, thus, compromised, mail servers, it wasn't. And if the bad guys had compromised an ISP's mail gateway, there would be much better uses to which they could put it, if even for a short time, than mining legitimate email address', believe me. (Tho they'd almost certainly do that as they were passing through.)

What most likely happened is that some vendor with whom johngalt dealt sold his email address or it was stolen from somebody's address book, perhaps a vendor's, by one of the common address-harvesting trojans running around. (The most-commonly exploited email client applications are OuchLook and LookOut Express. Vendors, in particular, that use these put their entire customer base at-risk daily.)

(I'll give you three guesses what I do for a living and an avocation ;).)
 
OK
Guess number one: You are a miner
Guess number two: Private investigator looking for ED
Guess number Three: You work at Best Buy and drive a Black and White VW bug!!!:D :D :p :D
 
I DID post my email one time in the tomahawk section so a member could email me a picture of a hawk he had just completed. That solves how it was grabbed, now I'm working on the origin of the forged emails.
 
wolfmann601 said:
OK
Guess number one: You are a miner
Guess number two: Private investigator looking for ED
Guess number Three: You work at Best Buy and drive a Black and White VW bug!!!:D :D :p :D
Click to expand...
Guess #3 would be closest, but no cigar :). I actually administer mail servers, for starters. (No, not for any of the ISPs.)
 
johngalt said:
I DID post my email one time in the tomahawk section so a member could email me a picture of a hawk he had just completed. That solves how it was grabbed,
Click to expand...
Not unlikely. I've had spamtraps I*ve put up on web pages harvested in as little as seven days--and that's on out-of-the-way web servers.

Never, never, never, ever put your unmunged email address anywher on a web page. It will certainly be harvested. And once one spammer/scammer has it, it's usually only a matter of time before they all have it.

johngalt said:
Inow I'm working on the origin of the forged emails.
Click to expand...
Good luck with that. (Hint: There's a reason prosecution and conviction of spammers is so low.)
 
johngalt said:
now I'm working on the origin of the forged emails.
Click to expand...
Good luck with that.

It's more likely from an international network. Going to go after an internet cafe in Kazakhstan or some network in Korea? SPAM abuse is barely policed in the US, and internationally it's a joke.

Even if it's from a US network, all you'll find out the network of origin. You cannot call them and demand them to tell you who that person is short of getting a subpoena. Even if you could find out who it is, are you going to take your "wrath of god" out on Grandma Betty who doesn't realize she has a computer virus that is relaying SPAM without her knowledge after opening an attachment that was a virus?

Welcome to the world of spoofed email. Delete it, move on.
 
OK, the door has been closed behind the horses. I'm still going to try tracing the emails back as far as I can, even if it's spoofed. I have found that sometimes there is some laziness and covering their tracks. Yes, it could be a zombie forwarding the emails, but, I won't know until I check. I've tracked many of them back.
 
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