Originally Posted by Lneal
Help!!
I just received an email with an address of an older gentleman who I have corresponded about family genealogy earlier this year.
I know it was not from him so I deleted it and I know it is a scam asking for money to bail him out in another country due to unfortunate circumstances. Okay, so I deleted the email. Now I am wondering if I should be concerned about identity theft since they used one of my personal contacts. What should I do any one know?
Absolutely DO NOT open or respond to this email - it's a hack job. Most of us have by now received similar emails. If you can call or write this gentleman, do so, and inform him that his email has been hacked - he needs to close that account and open another one. Don't delete it... forward it without opening to fraud.at your email provider.com, i.e.
[email protected], or
[email protected].
Many times if you right click on the unopened email, it will pull up a box; select "View Message Source," and you can pretty well see where it comes from. Sometimes it will end with "ru" (Russia) or "ch" (China). That's where a lot of this type of scam comes from.
It always amazes (and dismays) me to see how many people there are in the world who don't seem to have anything better to do than to hack into and/or destroy other people's computers. :(