I just got my first e-mail scam on my personal e-mail address

[dixiegrrrrl]

Had the same personal addy for 14 years. But our ISP provider had moved our e-mail to Yahoo a few years go. So we have to have Yahoo addresses just so email can be sent to our frontier email account.

The email was from a friend's Yahoo address.. It said she was traveling and needed to buy a birthday present for her niece.
(I know she has one niece. )
but the return address on that email was her name & outlook dot com, instead of yahoo. aha!I

being curious to find out the whole scheme, I asked how I could help.

Well....all "she" wanted was for me to buy 500.00 worth of google game cards. in 100.00 denominations,
and scrape off the back to reveal the pin, then take a photo of the pins and forward the pics to them.

that's quite a sum of money, so I asked them which niece it was for, and gave them 2 fictitious names to choose from.
Didn't get an answer back for over 30 minutes.

they just answered, had picked one of the names.
Can you believe that?

I'm debating if I want to play with them a bit more or just blowing them off with a serious secret answer question.

The real problem is I called my friend, she said yeah, she's heard from quite a few people by now, and had changed her Yahoo password yesterday.
So I sent her a test email at her Yahoo address, asking her to call me back, and guess what?
she got that email.
and so did the scammer, who gave an excuse why it could not call me.
which means they are intercepting her yahoo emails STILL.???


Looks like I need to get a one of those highly rated private email services....like Start Page now has.

[lapfog_1]

1. Tell them you will be happy to send the $500 because X is your favorite

but you need to access the money from your 401K and that requires a bank fee of about $100. So if they send you the $100 you will be happy to send them $600.

See what happens.

[grumpyduck]

2. Love it.

[rurallib]

3. Think I would just start blowing their emails away without opening them

no sense in getting yourself in a situation where you might accidentally give away some information.
Besides why waste your time on them?

[thinkingagain]

4. I also have frontier

And hated that they are “ powered by yahoo” first went a few rounds with them when yahoo made you agree to there new terms ( haven’t yet done that) frontier cust service tried to tell me they didn’t have that when I walked them through the steps they couldn’t believe it they didn’t know that the agreement was also under the login.
Anyhow for your friend she might check her settings and see if they changed or added a forwarding address as you said it was like they intercepted the emails.
Like I said frontier settings are weird and it took me awhile to find it when my husbands account got hacked a while back. What actually helped him was he was having all his emails forwarded to another account. So they didn’t change or add one but it looked like they actually deleted emails as all the ones pertaining to the hacking was missing there is a lot more to it than this but it gives you an idea. On Frontier you can’t see recent logins only the last one unlike gmail and actually yahoo to some extent. At least as far as I can tell.
The other thing I read but don’t really understand is hackers create a file (so look for unfamiliar files) and this is the part I don’t get they make it so things like certain words etc can be the trigger to forward delete etc emails.

[abqtommy]

5. Kinda makes us wonder if there's any truth to the claim that email providers will never sell

our personal information! But I wouldn't worry too much about getting a "secure" email account. Just pay attention and don't open/send to your spam folder any message that doesn't look legit.