My e-mail hacked

Thanks to one of the admins here for support. After figuring out I wasn't a spam scammer myself, they did offer the support to victims that their website mission statement claims, so the least I can do in return is to ad some relevant content.

So apparently a spam scammer somehow hacked my e-mail server. I noticed upon checking my e-mails last Saturday morning that all of a sudden I start getting bombarded about 8:30 in the morning with undeliverable e-mails sent out with my hosting account domain name and my e-mail address. Maybe they figured some business wouldn't check their e-mails over the weekend.

Now this is an e-mail address I have had for almost 2 years that has never really received any spam as I don't post it on my website, I don't post it anywhere in the Internet to be sucked up by spam programs, and no forums or anything else is registered to it. Apparently that has worked quite well. It is my only e-mail address associated with that biz.

The hacked/spam/scam e-mail text body was the some mystery shopper job scam thing offering $300 to contact various businesses and fill out a form about the interaction. The dead giveaway was the reply e-mail address ostensibly to this business was to some bluemail address, not to the sender. As to the body of the scam job offer, no business name, no website, no telephone number, nothing. Gee, real legitimate!

The particular scam can be seen within the forum here

It took 4 hours for the clowns at my host provider to finally block the domain. I had no idea how to change my e-mail password on the server side, so after finally answering those support questions, I was able to change my password on both the server side and in my e-mail program. What is it about website hosts that all expect customers to be webmasters anyway?! Maybe I should have just found the local 10 year old nerdy kid on the block who would have just shook his head at me and had it done in 60 seconds.

I will guess the scammer must have sent out over a hundred thousand e-mails in just 4 hours, as I was getting the bounced, undeliverable ones back into my e-mail folder at the rate of about a thousand an hour.

Once I changed my e-mail account passwords, I tried to reply to an e-mail from a business contact's gmail account, and received a reply message back that gmail had identified me as a spammer. GREAT!

Then in doing some Internet searching, I find out my domain or IP was now on some blacklist. Actually two. GREAT!

I read the steps one has to take to petition for removal. Oh, just peachy. Like I would know how to do all that, let alone take all the time.

I sent off another support ticket to my host and they figured out someway to change my IP or whatever so it circumvented me having to deal with the blacklist removal protocols.

I debated replying to the 5 or so people who didn't pay attention to the job scam e-mail instruction and they e-mailed me back instead. I felt bad for these people, as they sent me their confidential info, their cellphone, etc. One was a housewife who works from home. One was from India. $300 could represent half a years salary to some of these people in those countries. Praying on people like that desperate for work or income is lower than whale waste.

So yes, I did reply back and told them what to look for, how to tell how these things are legit or scams, and politely but in no uncertain terms told them to never give out the sort of info they gave out.

Next I tried to e-mail the bluworld people, providers of the free blumail accounts. Gee, their only e-mail address to contact them bounces back. Real nice.

At least their domain wasn't privately registered, so I called them in N.Y. The woman who answered the phone with no name or biz name was quite defensive when I mentioned that one of their members was hacking my e-mail and using them as the reply. She finally figured out I was legit and gave me a different e-mail to forward the info to for member removal, but she agreed that they can resign back up in a heartbeat, and I could get in line for the thousands of similar removal requests they get...each month!

After almost a week, I only get 1 or 2 bounced scam e-mails back now, and so far I have not seen any other spam.

Anyway, that's my story (and I'm sticking to it! lol

Thanks again to one of the admins here.

Welcome to Scamwarners.
It is possible (and often done) for spammers and scammers to spoof email headers to give the impression that emails came from somewhere else. Something that is easier than hacking email accounts.

As Arnold said, email addresses can be spoofed--but a scammer is unlikely to try to alter the IP, so if the IP ended up blacklisted, the provider is right--the scammers were actually in your email.

If you provider heavily tightens the spam filters on their end, you may not see much of an increase in unwanted email. If they don't, and you keep the email address, you will probably see the amount of spam continuing to rise, as the details were sold/shared by the hackers.

Unfortunately, the front lines of "tech support" for many webhosts today consists of people with no actual knowledge, only a series of scripts for common issues. When an off-script issue comes up, they can be extremely slow to respond (and inaccurate in their responses too).