Once scammers or hackers get your email address, you are likely to find a deluge of spam and scam emails coming your way and it’s virtually impossible to get your name off those scam lists.

What Are Phishing Email Scams

This is where the scammer pretends to be someone you know or a company you buy from e.g. BT broadband or Amazon or maybe from a government department – anyone they think you might trust.

They try to get your email address as well as logins and passwords and financial information.

The easiest way to get your details is often by phishing emails.

They buy a list of email addresses from other scammers and send out emails– maybe pictures of kittens to click on  or a promise of a $500 voucher or a threat of fines for overdue tax etc.

The most common are:

• Advertisement spams such as online shopping, pharmacy purchases
• Work-from-home job offers and schemes
• Threats from such as the tax office
• Free offers
• Lottery wins from lotteries you didn’t even enter

Other Ways That Spammers Use To Get Your Email Address

1. By using harvesting programs

These programmes search websites, forums etc. and collect email addresses for the scammers.

If your email address is anywhere on the Internet, then it can be found and sold to other scammers.

2. Creating sets of possible email addresses from a small number of genuine ones.

If your company has emails of the format firstname.surname @companu.com for example then scammer simply make up addresses using common names.

They cans end out messages to hundreds or thousands of such made up addresses and se which ones get replies.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

In the USA, four Chinese military officers of the PLA army have been arrested and charged with stealing the personal details of 145 million people. They are accused of hacking the credit reference company Equifax over a three month period.  They are also believed to have hacked the information of 15 million UK citizens and that data includes name and date of birth.

This is one of the biggest data breaches ever and it’s not known if the information has been published on the Internet. If so, it could leave a lot of people open to scammers.

The American authorities are making a clear point to China that their hacking enterprises have to stop.

Countries carrying out espionage is nothing new but the Chinese do appear to have industrialised the process and continue to use PLA army specialists to acquire information from American and European companies and that is then passed on to Chinese businesses to give them an advantage.

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