Suddenly I started receiving a bunch of scam mails (phishing). I suspect some bot or bot-net is involved, because I’ve received maybe a couple hundred e-mails at the time of writing, all from different (likely auto-generated) senders. With anything from 2-10 emails per day.
The scam is essentially just some phishing, all related to the same topic. I’ve mostly been able to mitigate it by filtering out mails containing certain keywords or phrases that show up in the scam mails. However, the mails change relatively often (about once a day) so every now and then something gets through, and I’ll update my filter.
My question is really if there’s any way I can figure out
- Where this is coming from,
- How they got hold of my email
So that I can try to go after the root cause / prevent other scammers from getting hold of it.
I’ve found that 99.99% of my spam comes from emails with weird extensions - .xyz, .world, .shop, .best, etc. - so I’ve gotten a significant amount of relief in getting a mail client that lets me block entire domain extensions (BlueMail mobile).
Happened to me a while back. In my case, they had also gotten access to my google password manager and were trying to cover their tracks in funneling money from my bank account and purchasing phones on several platforms (google store, eBay, etc).
Absolutely change your banking passwords, let them know that there could be potential fraud, and start looking for purchases on every platform you might have saved financial information on.
Best of luck.
Spam email has always been a problem, and there is really no way to find out how they got your email address and no way to prevent it either. Email lists are bought, sold and traded all the time.
What I do is keep the email client Thunderbird running on my desktop. It has a really good smart spam filter that learns from the email you receive and what you mark as spam/not spam. With IMAP, even your mobile devices benefit from the filtering.
Every few days I’ll check the junk folder and mark “not spam” anything that it incorrectly flagged as spam and go through my inbox and mark spam on anything it missed. I think it miss-flags maybe 3 or 4 emails per week right now. Doesn’t happen often.
There’s nothing you can do, because they’ve already sold it a billion other scammers. Burn it down and start over.
Root cause is they want to make money. It happens without your cooperation.
I don’t think you can stop that.
