Just Got A Bogus Email, Supposedly From My Landlord.

[Crusty Juggler]

Can anyone fill me in on what's happening here?

Got a fake email, supposedly coming from my landlord's yahoo mail account. It's some sort of work at home scam. The email originates from Kazakhstan.

What's going on here? Is my landlord's computer infected with some sort of email contact stealing virus? Or perhaps mine? I'm doing a scan of the system and user data partitions now with MSE.

[Will T.]

I get emails from time to time purporting to be from known contacts which are actually scams from somewhere else entirely. I think they somehow look through your contact list, pick a name at random, and apply it to the message in an attempt to make it appear legit (not that it succeeds ). I even occasionally get them with my own email address as the sender!

I don't know how it works, but I don't think it indicates infection as I run frequent MSE scans of my system and nothing comes up, even when I've received these messages.

What email service do you use? I only ever get these messages at my old mostly-unused Windows Live/Hotmail address. My Gmail account hasn't had this problem.

[Checkm8]

Someone hacked my email address before and started spamming everyone in my address book.

Tell your landlord to change his/her password.

[NoahTheBoa]

His email password was probably discovered. My e-mail got broken into once and whoever broke into it sent hundreds of emails to all of my contacts with various scams. There's probably no viruses.

You should probably let him know that you got that email from his account because he might not realize he's been compromised.

[Crusty Juggler]

MSE scan came up clean.

The scam email came into my Gmail account.

And yeah, I texted my landlord and told him to scan his PC. I'll tell him to change his email password as well.