Mysterios emails???
About a few months ago, I started getting
these emails from Africa or London, saying either I won some kind of lotto, but always
asking for info and the emails from Africa
says shes the wife of some farmer affected
by President's Mugambe's land reforms
and theyre wish is to open bank accounts
or open businesses here in the US and
they offer a certain % once the transaction
has been done. To me sounds like money
laundering or something im not sure. But my questions is how do they get my email???
Has anybody gotten these emails.
Comments
i'd imagine that your email address is:
[email protected]
email addresses can be easily gleaned either by adding @yahoo.com to the id you have made public on your profile:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/my/profile?show=91ff4d...
or by adding @yahoo.com to your id on the profile pages:
http://profiles.yahoo.com/coleblondehead
90% of the time combining the yahoo id with with @yahoo.com will be a 'hit' (an existing email address) as there are more people using the .com yahoo email address than their localized yahoo address (.co.uk, .co.in etc).
yahoo ids are publicly available, and a fine source for spammers of all kinds. automated software running 24/7 can strip thousands of ids from the public 'members directory':
http://members.yahoo.com/interests/business_school...
that said i do get more of those types of nigerian emails on my yahoo email address (despite me never actually using it) than i do on any other email service i have, so i guess the scammers like the ease with which email addresses can be collected from yahoo.
You put your Email in a public profile or you put it somewhere online for anyone to see. The scammers use bots to crawl the net looking for emails.. any email will do. Legit sites that ask you to register will not hand out your email. When you go to a site, look closely at privacy policies before signing up.
Do a simple test and you will see what I mean. Make 2 new accounts..... go to places to sign an address book and leave a comment with one of your new email accounts in it. leave the other one private. You will soon discover the one you posted for the world to see will get more and more scammers sending junk and spam. For some reason, religious sites that let you leave comments get way more attention. I did a personal study on this and I can honestly tell you that if you use your email wisely... you may NEVER get spam.
I have an address that I've been using for almost a year with absolutely no spam whatsoever in it... and that's not even filtering anything!
They get your address from places that you have registered, or from other people's address books when their machines get viruses. You should report these by sending a copy of the full headers along with the text of the message to [email protected]
They are very dangerous scams, and the more people report them the sooner they get stopped.
Yes, I've gotten them too.. and how do they get your E-mail adress? Maybe from yahoo, maybe from some other site. Sometimes, you never really know where they get it from, just, ignore them, but them in your trash, everybody deals with those problems.
Chances are, it is NOT money laundering... If you play along with the scammers, they will ask YOU to send them money, through Western Union, to cover unexpected "fees", etc... Go to http://www.419legal.org/ and search...
you could have logged on a libary's computer, It could have a keylogger on the computer.
they track you and put cookies on your pc... don't open them.