User login domain now gets spam emails

[Bod]

My user login I gave buy at, has now started to get spammed, no one else has had this email as its unique to buy at.

How does this happen, does Buy at allow harvesters to collect our data, or from posts i have previously said on here, other companies do not use the buy at email software and therefore risk our own email domains.

I am not saying buyat are to blame but in the passed companies have emailed from non buy at means and this could be the reason i am now getting spam to the address purely used to login and get news from buy at.


Is anyone else getting them....

[Rynert]

Is it an e-mail address that would be easy to 'guess' ?

SomeName@SomeDomain.com

Or is it random letters, fhgsgyy@SomeDomain.com

If it is the former, some e-mail address generator finally 'guessed' your e-mail address... throw millions of combinations before the @ and you get it right eventually...

[Barry]

Most the time its just randon guesses - put a 'catch all' email address on the domain and just wait and see how many mails you get for every conceivable name under the sun.

Seriously - I doubt very much you email address has been leaked, infact 99.9999999999% sure. (If I could put a re-occouring period above the .9 - I would)

[Rovin Dawson]

Hi,

Just to fully confirm what the previous posters have stated, buy.at have never passed email addresses or other confidential information to third parties, nor do we have any plans to do so in the future.

Most of the larger spammers have fairly intelligent systems that will attempt to go through all combinations of names and common groups (info@, enquiries@, sales@ etc) and eventually get through to a proper mailbox.

If you want to provide me with a new email addy that is less likely to be spammed, then please do not hesitate to contact myself or one of the Account Management team on 0191 241 6500.

Kind regards,


Rovin

[Bod]

Cheers Rovin

[Dynamoo]

I haven't received spam from a buy.at signup address, but I have from other networks and merchants.

What I think happens is this - either the network or someone they share their data with (i.e. a merchant) gets their PC infected with a virus - that virus then harvests the email addresses and sends them to a third party who then spams them.

One company I buy from (not on A4U) has a unique signup address, and I get UK-targetted phishing emails to it. The company doesn't respond to my reports of this and you do wonder what else has been compromised.