A PLAGUE OF SPOOFS

[Jaguar5-]

A friend was in touch to tell me I had sent him a scam email in January this year. I had not; nothing in my sent box. He contacted me again recently to say he had another scam from me. Although the email claimed to be from me it was from [REMOVED]. This guy wanted my friend to open some photographs.

Then my wife got something similar, claiming to be from me but appeared to be from [REMOVED]. The message was the same--open the photographs.

On august 30 another friend contacted me to say she had had a similar email.

Then the wife got another from [REMOVED] with some Arabic thrown in. One of my daughters has had one of these spoofs. All saying the same thing: open the photographs!

McAfee says I have no viruses. My sent folder shows none of these emails. But somebody has got my contact list and is playing the fool. Any ideas how to stop this please?

[MOD EDIT: Personal and private information has been removed from this post.]

[nodrogd · Accepted solution]

Check if your email accounts have been part of a data breach. If they are it may explain things:

https://haveibeenpwned.com/ 

[Jaguar5-]

sorry, i do not think your reply helps. my view is that Virgin Media should help

[goslow]

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@Jaguar5- wrote:
sorry, i do not think your reply helps. my view is that Virgin Media should help

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The spam emails won't be coming from your VM email account so there is not too much that VM can do to help you. In all likelihood the display name might be your name but the underlying email address will be something different (or occasionally spoofed to look like yours).

The link provided by nodrogd is to check whether you email address has been leaked at any point in the past as a result of a data leak from a company.

If that has happened, your email address (along with many others) will be sold on as a list to spammers and scammers who will send out fake emails from their own systems pretending to be you. You may not be the source of the leak. Your contact details could have been leaked via an online account belonging to someone else.

If you use the link from nodrogd at #2 and you find your email address and an associated password for a particular service has been leaked, you should check that you have not used the same leaked email/password combo elsewhere as that could leave you open to further spamming/scamming or data/identity theft.

[ravenstar68]

@Jaguar5- 

Do you still have a copy of the email received by your wife?  If so would you be willing to forward to me as an attachment?

Note:  I'm not a Virgin Media staff member, I am a former customer who is still a VIP -Which is a special status given out by Virgin Media to users who've been helpful in the past.

Here's my take on what's been said so far.

Spoofing can be done but is getting harder and harder thanks to email administrators using DMARC to protect their mail.
Viewing the email headers can give important information on the path an email has taken across the internet.

Virgin Media staffers (Forum Team)  Will get to this thread, but first responders are often community members like @nodrogd 

Finally, even if a mail as been sent using your Virgin Media account via Virgin's SMTP servers, it quite often will NOT show in your sent mail folder.  The reasons for this are rooted in how email works.  (It's IMAP clients that copy the Sent Mail folder to the online server not the SMTP transaction itself).  If I had your username and password, (I don't ;)) I could quite easily send an email from your account and it would not appear in your Sent emails.

Tim

[Jaguar5-]

very helpful. i have replied to you, thank you. But what do i do to stop this please?

[Jaguar5-]

thanks for all this but what should i do to get out of this situation?

[Jaguar5-]

i am out of my depth onthis. please how do i send you a copy of the email?

[Carley_S]

Hi @Jaguar5

My apologies @ravenstar68 has not responded. 

If you have concerns with email spoofing you can report this to us here 

[Jaguar5-]

hello, a few weeks ago, I described how some of my contacts were getting spoof emails purporting to be from me in my name. But I had not sent them. To date nobody has been able to help.

one person said report them to phishing, which I did but that has made no difference.

I have now had 4 spam emails telling me that my MacAfee account is in need of renewal which it is not.

anybody any idea how to get rid of this plague of spoofs?

Is Virgin Media able to help me to bring this to a stop?