Help, My e-mail account is being used by some spammer!!

Neo Fan

King's Dry Cleaner
Joined
Nov 23, 2000
Posts
396
For the past few days now, my inbox has been flooded with undeliverable returned e-mail that I did not send. The subjects are the typical spam ads, but I have no idea who these recipients are, they are not in my address book. I went to the Symantec website and did the virus scan, and none were found. I don't know what to do here. Any suggestions?
 

Sundance

Sho's Rival
Joined
Feb 3, 2004
Posts
1,447
Your pretty screwed...not much you can do unfortunately. What happening to you is the result of a virus. All you really can do is copy the addressed down of people you send to and open a new email address, preferrably w/ some other email service.:confused:
 

Makismo

Ghost of Captain Kidd
Joined
May 14, 2002
Posts
1,670
I hope that you didn't fall for the Insta-Kiss Scam. Those guys tell you that someone has sent you a message but you must type in your email address and password to get it. I fell for this trick a long time ago when I was young. I still get those messages. If the hacker has your password, then you had better just change it. Having a virus scan won't stop them from using your password since they will not have to hack your machine to use your email address. Change the password ASAP or bad things can and will happen.
 

Sundance

Sho's Rival
Joined
Feb 3, 2004
Posts
1,447
Actually, upon further research, i found that you may not even have the original virus but may in fact, be on the receiving end of a virus that one of your friends has. In which case, cleaning your email, via nortons or even cleaning every account you have may not help. The only way to stop the action, and keep your account, is to have all the people on your address list clean there computers/accounts too.:eek:
 

Syxx573

Azura's Swordsmith
Joined
Oct 17, 2003
Posts
3,519
That seems to happen to me every time I get a new e-mail.

But fortunately yahoo throws everything in the bulk mail folder.
 

TheBigBB

Formerly known as dmhawkmoon
Joined
May 5, 2002
Posts
6,117
Man no one has your e-mail. It's just a virus affecting someone. These viruses that cause things to send e-mails as your name have been around and common for a long time. I'm just surprised you hadn't heard about it yet. Just delete them. it's probably not you who has the virus anyway.
 

Lee Gray

SSVS Special Plz..., Buying & Selling that, Never
Joined
Sep 21, 2001
Posts
7,506
Just recently from out of the blue i keep getting emails sent to me with the dorm virus on it and norton cant heal them so has to qurantine them all the time, i dont know why it has only just started happening as my email address is very secret and never had this problem before in 4 years.
 

Buro Destruct

Formerly known as, Buro Destruct, , Southtown Stre
Joined
Jul 27, 2002
Posts
9,058
It's a virus, I have similar problems. The outlook.exe file is infected and I haven't been inclined to uninstall/reinstall Outlook in order to repair it.
 

chimpmeister

Former Moderator
Joined
Aug 13, 2000
Posts
5,228
I've seen this happen before. While this case might have been a virus, it is more likely that a spammer simply used your email address as their "return" address. Then he shipped out 50,000 or so spam messages, and YOU are the one who gets the "bounced" messages. This helps them get their spam through (your email address is valid) and avoid the bounced responses (which come back to you).

This happened to a person who I help with computer issues. A pharmaceutical spammer used her email address as the "from" address on their spam messages. She had over 2000 bounced messages come back to her inbox. The spammer was one of the "Offshore Pharmacy" idiots . . . who have tons of different stupid spam URLs (pharmawarehouse.biz, pharmacasa.biz, etc.

Basically, if they only use your email address once, the undeliverables will eventually diminish and finally go away after a few days to a week or so. Its extremely annoying, but it will go away.
 

dragonwillow

Ghost of Captain Kidd
Joined
Oct 28, 2003
Posts
1,664
Chimp is 100% right... that's DEFINITELY not virus behavior. Most likely, a spider crawling the web picked up your email somewhere, and an automated program decided to use your email address as one of the nodes the spammer spoofs from.

Nothing you can do about it, so in the future, just don't post your email publicly if you don't want that to happen anymore.

It's pretty easy to spoof an email. But you can always check the originating address by checking the headers. Of the IP's and addresses listed there, one of them is the real one (doesn't have to be the first).
 

Neo Fan

King's Dry Cleaner
Joined
Nov 23, 2000
Posts
396
Thanks for all the reply's guys. Chimp and Dragon, I think you are right. When I look at the returned messages, the all seem to have the same type of subject line, for an "enlargement" product. Hopefully this will diminish in a few days. But, what can I do if this continues? Will I have to get a new email address?
 
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