Wierd Email Scam! Does This Happen To You...

by 16 replies
19
Hello Everyone


The last few days i have been receiving an email promoting different various products.

The problem is, i know for a fact i never signed up for it.

Don't even know how they got my email.

I thought maybe this was due to Aweber being compromised again..

The strange thing is, it doesn't have an unsubscribe link and the email is actually coming from me.

The other problem is i have over 78,000 people on my list and i have had several of my clients tell me they are getting these same emails.

But the emails are from them sending to themselves.

I would like to figure this out and resolve this problem so i can let my clients on my list resolve this also.

The only thing i can figure is whoever is sending the emails are sending them through some type of software like mailboy but i thought those type of emails get blocked right away by spam guards.

I have alerted Aweber but they deny anything has happened.

Here's there response

Hello Craig,

I have looked at your account and
don't see anything wrong with it or
show any type of vulnerability.

You might want to check with
your hosting provider.

We would be able to tell if there
was any type of vulnerability on
your account

Cheers,

Shawn


Now this is Kooky because what would
my host have to do with my list on Aweber.

How can someone access my hosting and
get my clients name.

Sorry for the language but Aweber sounds
like there full of crap to me

Any Help would be great..

Thank You So Much
Craig
#main internet marketing discussion forum #email #happen #scam #wierd
  • Happens all the time all over the place. It's a virus that gets bounced around the Internet. A vulnerable machine becomes a bot and starts spamming all over the place using your own email address as the sender. This doesn't mean your machine is infected, but a machine somewhere with you on a distribution list is infected.
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    • This has never happened to me before. Is there anyway to stop this?
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  • I am sooooo sick of this sort of comment.

    Why is it that people who have zero clue about the technology are so willing to malign others based on this vast inexperience?

    The odds are that either you or someone who knows you has a trojan on their system, which is sending the mail. These systems use the recipient's address as the sender, after getting them from various places on the infected machine(s). The reason is simple: People are somewhat likely to whitelist their own address. They almost never blacklist it...

    Your friends and clients aren't doing it to mess with you. Aweber almost certainly has nothing to do with it. You may even be the source. When was the last time you ran a good, recently updated virus checker on your machine?


    Paul
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    • Spammers have "guessing machines" that send out variations of all kinds of spam to addresses that may or may not exist.

      They also have bots that go out and find domain names and eMail addresses on websites and then automatically send spam to those domain names with all kinds of names in the part before the @

      If you have any sort of eMail address on your site that looks normal (i.e., name@site.com), then they will harvest that.

      Even putting name[at]site.com doesn't help any more.

      I've even had the scum go to my shopping cart to see what the eMail address might be.

      They also do something called "spoofing" which is using your name or other "real" names (including AT&T and Paypal) to make it look like the eMail came from there.

      It may look like it came from you, but it didn't. They're just spoofing. I get tons of those. It's just spam. I know the minute I see that it's supposedly from me that it's just spoofed spam.

      For other bogus from addresses, you can hover your cursor over the from name in gMail and see what the address really is. But if it's spoofed, you can't. You just have to figure it out. I now blacklist my name in the from because I never send eMail to myself from one of my accounts.
    • I have to agree with Paul on this one--as a techie I get this all the time. People defer to my expertise until I say something they don't want to hear and suddenly I'm "full of crap."

      If you don't trust a company don't use them or transition off of them now. Don't depend on their expertise until something bad happens and then decide you don't trust them. It is when disaster strikes that you need their knowledge the most.

      As someone has pointed out--spambots and trojans often try different addresses, even unpublished ones, just as hackers have programs that use "brute force programming" to plow through various word and number combinations till they hit someone's password. This doesn't mean that anyone gave out their password or wrote it down somewhere--although you can complain that it wasn't complex enough to defeat this type of attack, e.g. did not have enough upper/lower case letters, numbers, and special characters.

      Email messages can be forwarded--just because you don't tell anyone your email address doesn't mean that those receiving them don't forward the messages. Often times this is done on unknowingly by trojans, malware and other malicious software. Email can also be intercepted, although this is much less likely to happen since email is usually encrypted between servers, but all it takes is one open email server that has a message from you to gain your email address.

      There really is no defense against this other than to blacklist your own email address and white list only those should be sending you email and encourage those people to make sure their machine is cleaned. I use the malware forum at MajorGeeks.com - Download Freeware and Shareware Computer Utilities. to clean my machines for both personal and professional use. You could also make up a new email address to use but that can be annoying if many of your contacts know that address already.
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    • I agree with Paul (...after reading his post...).

      Slamming Aweber as a business is not the best thing to do. They have been a reputable company for many years, one of the most trusted in the business, so to use those words so publicly can be seen as a tad bit hasty.

      But in Craig's defence, and my knowledge on this is limited I do admit upfront, but the answer that Aweber gave is that it might have something to do with his hosting account.

      Given all the answers given, even Mr Myers' answer, I don't see how that can have anything to do with it and maybe that's where the response from Craig came from (...even though it was a little harsh...)

      Would love somebody with a real technical background to chime in about their thoughts.

      Reach new heights

      Nathan
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  • Craig,

    The same sort of thing happens to me in my personal account.

    I get emails from people in my contact list. It comes through the spam protection no problem (...because it is APPARENTLY from someone on my contacts...) but I know for a fact it is not.

    Have never had it happen to me with the people on my aweber account though.

    Hopefullly, you get an answer to this, it's something that can really hurt all our business if it's not sorted out (...promoting any old crap to the people on our list who we work so hard to provide quality to, I'd be spitting blood right now...)

    Thanks for the post.

    Subscribing to see if a definite answer comes up.

    Reach new heights,

    Nathan
  • It's a total nightmare, I get e-mails with our company name
    in the FROM field promoting SPAM.

    Incredibly annoying, I dread to think what some of our customers
    think.
  • Hmmm, all I will say is this is "creepy" , but
    like one of the respondents here say - there's
    hardly anyway to stop this from EVER
    happening, except NEVER give your email
    ads to anyone or put it anywhere - but
    can one do that?

    Kingsley
  • Yes, that often happened try asking your friend they're not aware of it.
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