I reported on a particular blackmail spam email which appears to have been sent from your email address and claims your email account has been hacked. I have had several reports of these coming in.
Despite what the text says in the message (which is rather unpleasant), if you see one of these and are concerned send them to me and I will check them. You are not the only one receiving them, and there seems to be a high incidence of them currently. You can check them out on YouTube as well.
I have seen various methods of manipulating the email to get it past spam filtering and I have reported all messages back to the hosting company to see if they can establish a method for detecting them and trapping them.
I saw another one over the weekend that used some very clever practices to again fool any spam filtering. The last set I saw used an embedded image which was displayed as text when it got to your inbox. You might have thought it looked like bad grammar, but it was actually an image of text, not text. So it would bypass spam filters.
The latest one is text, but if you look at the content (from a programmer’s view) it is carefully crafted with unusual characters which would again miss the spam filters. I have reported this one too.
These emails are crafted in such a way as to embarrass those they are sent to, knowing that they are unlikely to complain, and in some cases people pay up. They must do otherwise there would be no point sending them.
If you get one, flag it to me, and I will check it out and let you know if you need to take any action. Hopefully the hosting company will improve their detect rates on these and they will disappear back into the noise.