Receiving extortion emails sent from my own Plusnet email address

[#1]

I've now created a rule in my email client which automatically removes emails with the same subject line and drops them into the deleted folder.  I can't do this with the sender email as it's my email address and it removes everything I send to myself (which I regularly do as reminders).  This is working fine on my PC, but, of course, what I didn't take into account is the time when I'm not on my PC and I'm accessing my emails via my iPhone which, as far as I can tell, won't let me create any rules in its mail app.  It's all very irritating!!!!!

[#2]

If you leave your PC running, it will move the mail for you all of the time ... so it might show for a short while on the phone, then move.

Same rules being run on two or more clients is not wise!

[#3]

@berylcuke  what was your conclusion to  Reply #12  ?

[#4]

Unfortunately I couldn't find a way of doing it with eM Client.  😕

[#5]

That's a shame !  ☹️

As a work around, when you email to yourself, you could always start the "Subject" line with a keyword (such as "ToSelf", "MyReminder", or whatever), then change your filter rule to look for your keyword ?

[#6 · Accepted solution]

Good idea!

I haven't received any of the current bunch of scam emails since yesterday so I suspect this campaign is over, though I am under no illusion that there won't be another one in the pipeline for a few weeks' time.

Thanks for all your help everyone.

[#7]

Part of the problem seemed to be that you send yourself reminder emails which is almost what this Trojan seems to be doing

Would it be plausible to create another email addy, say Gmail, and use that to send yourself reminders ?

That way you could blanket ban the previous email to email from the same address

I use 7 Gmail accounts for various things :

Main Google

Banks

Friends & Family

Outgoing email

Forums

2 x disposable that I use for miscellaneous sites

I have each account setup to instantly forward any inbound emails to another master email which is linked to Outlook 2021 using POP3 so all emails arrive in one inbox place and are tagged from which email they came from

Convoluted but works for me

[#8]

An easier solution might be to create an alias for the mailbox and send the copy me emails to the alias.

I wonder why bother anyway though? There will be a copy of the sent email in the sent items folder.

[#9]

The easiest solution is for the scammers to stop sending me these emails!!!!!!!!!!!!  But since that's not going to happen, it would be useful if I could block emails in PN webmail using the subject line wording as well as sender then they wouldn't pop up on my PC or on my iPhone at all once blocked.  It's all very tedious but perhaps one day the senders will realise I'm not going to send them loads of cryptocurrency and stop sending the emails!

What does still worry me though is how the senders got my email address address in the first place given that I have an unusual name and, therefore, an unusual address.  Any ideas?

[#10]

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@berylcuke wrote:

What does still worry me though is how the senders got my email address address in the first place given that I have an unusual name and, therefore, an unusual address.  Any ideas?

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The chances are that some company/someone you communicated with had their email database compromised - I know that is how one of my email accounts 'leaked'.

[#11]

@berylcuke
You may want to check if your email address has been found in any data breach,
check here
https://haveibeenpwned.com/

[#12]

Ditto.

And in my case that company didn't report the breach (but they should have).

Another e-mail address was leaked to 3rd parties after an energy supplier went under. My suspicions were that an ex-employee walked out of the door with a removeable storage device after downloading some 'useful stuff' - and into a new job with a new startup.

It isn't that difficult to track such stuff. It just takes a few moments.

[#13]

Such is one ok the real benefits of a catchall mailbox. One can give every company a unique email address for correspondence. If one of them leaks that unique address, it’s much easier to spot the guilty party.

[#14]

So... I put my email address into haveibeenpwned.com and found that my details have been breached on two occasions, via Online Spambot in August 2017 and the ShareThis service in July 2018, and no doubt sold on.  Great!  What confuses me though is that my Plusnet password has been changed several times since these incidents but the scammers are still able to send emails from my email address; in fact I had another batch of 20 plus emails today, or don't they need my password to do use my email address to send me emails???  My most recent, more complex, passwords (including my current PN password) haven't been leaked accordingly to haveibeenpwned, thankfully.

[#15]

@berylcuke No. they only need your email address in order to spoof it, as they have done to you recently.

Purely out of interest, what was the subject line in your current load of rubbish?