looking for Baxter Smith

[Fred Perreault]

I am trying to get in touch with Baxter Smith, from Delaware. He had been a busy member of the Creek for some time, but I have not seen any recent posts from him. My reason for this message is that today I recieved an email, supposedly from Baxter's email address, but it seems a little off. It appears that someone is using his address for some kind of phishing scam, and I want to resolve it. Baxter may want to know about this. If it is a scam, I am very curious how my name has entered the equation. In fact, maybe there are other similar scams ongoing at this time.
thank you,
Fred Perreault

[Mike Henderson]

I've received messages like that - obviously not actually written by the person who is supposed to be the sender. In those cases, it was the sender who had a virus and the virus had scanned his contact list and old messages and sent mail out to that whole list.

The message usually tries to get you to click on some link, which will then infect your computer.

Mike

[John K Jordan]

There is a Baxter Smith in the member list, apparently hasn't posted for a long time. But the forum shows he (or someone using his account) accessed the forum about an hour or so ago today. All I can think of is you might try sending a PM.

[Baxter Smith]

Hello all,
The real Baxter Smith here....
My email was hacked this morning and an email sent out, but it wasn't from me. After finding out about it thru phone calls and text messages, I sent an email to all contacts I had recorded in my address book advising them of the problem. Unfortunately it seems, if I hadnt saved you as a contact, you didnt receive my warning to ignore and delete the "request for an amazon gift card to be sent to a niece".

My apology for the issues! I did respond to Fred through a PM and have changed the log in password for my email.
Not sure what else I can do.

[Jim Koepke]

There are a lot of email scams that put names in the from line at random hoping people will open them and click on the link inside.

jtk

[Alan Rutherford]

There are more email scams than any of us will ever keep up with. No one should feel like they have to apologize for their name being used nor feel obliged to track it down. Just 20 minutes ago my wife got an email claiming to be from someone we think died 5-10 years ago. It said she wanted us to buy a gift card for her nephew and she'd pay us back. Deleted it.

It can be interesting and informative looking at the "source" of an email. I.e. the computer-coded part you don't usually see. Depending on what program you use for email, there should be a menu or roght-click selection like "View Message Source". It might be hundreds of lines of gibberish but somewhere near the top is the sender address and also the one it actually came from, which you can't otherwise see. Lots of other stuff sometimes.

I never opened the email I mentioned about the gift card. Looked at the source and saw what it was. By never opening the message we avoid any connection to links in the email.

[Stephen Tashiro]

It can be interesting and informative looking at the "source" of an email..

But before you look at suspicious emails, disconnect from the internet, so the sender doesn't get notified you opened it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon Not opening images in an email is good precaution, but it isn't sufficient since web beacons can be implemented by other means.

[Alan Rutherford]

But before you look at suspicious emails, disconnect from the internet, so the sender doesn't get notified you opened it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon Not opening images in an email is good precaution, but it isn't sufficient since web beacons can be implemented by other means.

If you are looking at the message source as I described, there is no interaction between the message and the internet because you haven't opened it. No need to disconnect. Your advice is good re actually opening the message. (Anybody who doesn't understand the difference should err on the side of caution.) After looking at the source* of an email, I'm rarely in doubt whether there's any risk or not.

* Not the sender. See my previous post.