[British-cars] It is urgent, please do respond

[Randall]

> Mark's AOL account is more than likely comprimised and there is a good
> chance it was used to send this message.  

I have not paid any attention to this incident, but when I received a very
similar email from a different Team.Net list/member a few months ago, I did
some investigation.  The fraudulent email did NOT come through the apparent
sender's account or computer, and in fact originated from a mail server
someplace in Nigeria.

It is an unfortunate fact that the "From" field in an email message is just
a text string.  Although some email servers will check it, most just pass
along whatever is in the field.  Thus it becomes trivial to send an email
that appears to be from someone else.  Many years ago (back when such things
seemed funny), I used to send out emails that purported to be from George
Washington at whitehouse.gov <G>

The only way to know for sure is to examine the IP addresses in the message
header, and even then all you know for certain is the IP address for the
last few servers it passed through.  The originating IP may also be faked.

-- Randall 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: british-cars-bounces at autox.team.net [mailto:british-cars-
> bounces at autox.team.net] On Behalf Of Aaron Whiteman
> Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2011 3:44 PM
> Cc: british-cars at autox.team.net
> Subject: Re: [British-cars] It is urgent, please do respond
> 
> On Tue, 15 Feb 2011, StuCohen at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > Of course this would really only work if you happen to have a friend
> named
> > Mark Creek. Could this be the dawn of a new type of micro-targeted
> spam?
> 
> Not just spam; this is fraud.
> 
With online addressbooks,
> it's pretty trivial to send emails as the victim to the victim's
> contacts once you have access to the account.
> 
> It wouldn't be the first time I've seen it.
> 
> --
> Aaron Whiteman
> Pullman, Washington
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