Email Phishing Scams and Spoofing Scam emails are not from mcaninch.net |
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Have you received strange emails that claim to be from me (Frank), but they actually come from |
different and non-sensical places – e.g., from ‘lyashevych.s (at) inagro.com.ua’ (in the Ukraine), |
and ‘utrillo.okada (at) y35b.nidxpvte.com', another 'fly-by-night' site with a PO Box in Panama). |
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As you may have already realized, these 'spoofed' email messages are not actually coming |
from me. Some third-party 'bad actor(s)’ are sending scam emails and phishing messages to you, |
and putting my name in the 'from' field shown on the screen (without my permission, of course). |
Sometimes, when a message looks ‘odd’, a close examination of the 'full message source' and |
the 'email headers' will reveal the true origin and message-forwarding trail around the world. |
Your email program can show you the complete headers (e.g. Google gmail ‘Show Original’). |
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'Third-party spoofing' of emails is an ongoing problem, and you are wise and correct to just |
DELETE anything that doesn't look right. My system has not been hacked, but some 'bad actor(s)' |
are sending this trash to you. Unfortunately, it is really easy to make emails look like they are |
coming from someone else, and the only thing that anyone can do is to run a 'Who Is' query [1] |
on the actual 'sent from' address (that is in the email headers of every message), which might be |
in the Ukraine, or somewhere in South America, or Florida, or, could be anywhere in the world. |
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Of course, a 'Who Is' query will tell you where that bad email really came from (not from me), |
there is still nothing you can do about it except to delete the spoofed junk mail, and tell your ISP. |
Since these messages are not coming from me, there does not seem to be anything that we could |
do to prevent this mis-use of my name and email address. Even if we changed to a different email |
address, our user names are still 'out there' from various sources, including some big data breaches. |
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So . . . 1. you are right to be careful, do not click on the links, delete the junk messages, and |
2. you should report the actual originating IP addresses to your email provider and to your ISP, |
since their systems should be catching and filtering these junk and scam SPAM messages. |
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[1] ‘Who Is’, https://www.whois.com > 'Enter Domain or IP’ and click the ‘WHOIS' button |
(it is completely safe for you to look at the whois data yourself, if you want to, and, FYI, |
running a WhoIs 'mcaninch.net' query will show Registrar eNom, LLC, site registered in 2000). |
[2] What Google learned from 1 billion evil email scams - Google teamed up with researchers |
from Stanford University to analyze 5 months’ worth of emails. This is what they found. |
blog.malwarebytes.com/privacy-2/2021/02/what-google-learned-from-1-billion-evil-email-scams |
New research reveals who’s targeted by email attacks |
cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/how-gmail-helps-users-avoid-email-scams |
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McAninch Family History NL v.XXIX (29) n.1 May 2021 Copyright Frank McAninch p2021-02 |
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