I had two spam emails today, from the same sender.
They were both obviously spam. One was about Virgin and one purported to be from Ofgem, inviting me to apply for a grant/rebate. (I deleted them straight away before thinking I should have kept them.)
The curious thing was that the “Ofgem” one had my name in the subject line. I think it followed a + sign.
Now I’m used to seeing my email address, but this was my actual monicker.
Any thoughts as to how they did this?
I think some less scrupulous companies sell a lot of data.
*Or rather some people working at them may. That is what I read a while ago anyway.
Your email address (and name) can get “harvested” from all sorts of places online - e.g. if you have a website, or from social media profiles.
And as almondbiscuit said, companies do sell on their mailing lists quite unscrupulously.
Not much you can do except flag it as spam in your email program so the next one goes into the Junk folder.
That’s what I do but it doesn’t always work, sometimes they keep popping up in the main list. Not that it bothers me, I am very careful what I open and check both legitimate and spam boxes several times a day.
Thanks. Gmail is quite good at identifying spam - it’s very rare that one gets through to my inbox - it was the use of my real name that puzzled me.
Check with https://haveibeenpwned.com/ - it will show in which data breaches your email might have been leaked
Chances are that you will be in at least one of the leaks, it’s basically impossible not to be. make sure you change online passwords fairly often and using a password manager can help remember them all.
I received an sms this morning saying …
Assurance Maladie Renouvellement obligatoire de votre Carte Vitale à effectuer avant le 31/08/2022. With a link to sante-ameli.com.
Pretty sure this is a con.
My real ameli account doesn’t tell me this.
Has anyone else seen this?
Surely all official French site will be at least “.fr”?
I agree with @AngelaR - especially as the whois info points to a Toronto company (the real owner being hidden behind this “privacy screen”)
This CVitale spam/scam thing has been flagged in so many quarters…a s a SPAM… and we’ve also mentioned it previously here on SF.
Please folk… don’t click on anything you receive on your phones/whatever… take great care.
Oups! I don’t remember seeing it before. But then 2019 was a long time ago…
Thanks Stella.
We can’t repeat this stuff enough… the more the merrier
hate for someone to fall foul…