How to Protect Your Email Address from Spam and Scams

How to Protect Your Email Address from Spam and Scams

How to Protect Your Email Address from Spam and Scams

 

Top Methods Scammers Use to Find Email Addresses - And How to Avoid Them

Every day, I receive dozens of emails claiming that I've won millions of dollars from a Yahoo lottery or because Bill Gates want to get rid of some of that cash burning holes in his pockets. How do scammers get hold of my personal email address to send me sweepstakes and lottery scams? Does it mean that sweepstakes I'm entering are selling my information?

Not necessarily. If you have any email address, it will probably receive spam eventually, whether you use it to enter sweepstakes or not. Here are some of the top methods that they use.

1. 'Scraping' Email Addresses from the Web

If you've left your email address in a signature, in a comment on a public forum, on a winner's list, or anywhere else that is publicly accessible, scammers can use programs to comb through the internet and harvest those email addresses.

To protect yourself, avoid leaving your full email address anywhere on the net. Don't use your email address as a username for a forum or website. If you need to share your address online, make it difficult for programs to read by disguising it so it's easy for humans to understand but difficult for computers. Ask sponsors to use only a portion of your email address on winner’s lists. 

2. Sending Scams to Random Email Addresses

Sweepstakes scam emails cost nearly nothing to send. That means that criminals can afford to send blanket emails to random email addresses and hope that someone will receive them.

To do this, the scammers start with a popular email service – say Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL - and then generate massive lists by combining common words and names. For example, the scammers might send mails to the top 100 most popular names and each birth year for people between the ages of 18 and 90. If your email address is john1970@yahoo.com, you'll get one of these mails.

It's difficult to avoid this method of harvesting emails. The best thing to do is not to respond to these mails, so that the scammers don't get confirmation that the address is active.

3. Harvesting Data from Fake Sweepstakes Sites

Scammers like to target people who are most likely to fall for their sweepstakes scams. This means that if they can get their hands on email addresses and other personal information from people who actually enter sweepstakes, they might a bit more success with their scams. One method that they use to get this information is by setting up a fake sweepstakes site. They might even give away a small prize, but their primary goal is to harvest your personal information and use it to contact you with scams.

4. Buying Email Lists from Sweepstakes Sites

It's possible that a company could hold a legitimate sweepstake and then decide to make some extra money by selling the personal information that it collected. In that case, scammers could easily get hold of a large list of sweepstakes entrants without having to take on the time or expense of running their own sweepstakes.

To protect yourself from having your information sold to other companies and scammers, check out the privacy policy of the sweepstakes that you enter. If the privacy policy is missing, untrustworthy, or it says that your information might be resold, do not enter the sweepstake. 

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