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Phishing scams are quickly becoming one of the most common and dangerous types of cyberattacks in today’s world. Phishing scams often begin with something as simple as an email address, but how do phishing scammers get your email address in the first place?
To effectively protect your personal and professional data, it’s essential to understand how scammers collect email IDs. This blog will cover the most common methods used to collect email addresses, how scammers leverage those addresses, and what to do if a scammer has obtained your email address.
What is a Phishing Scam?
Phishing is a type of cyberattack where scammers manipulate a person into giving away their personal or company data, such as passwords, financial information, or login credentials. Typically, phishing attacks will be disguised as an email, a fake website, or a text message that appears to be from a legitimate source.
Phishing gets much easier and much more dangerous once scammers acquire your email address.
How Do Scammers Get Your Information?
Scammers don’t always need complex techniques to get your email address. They often rely on simple, overlooked methods combined with a few advanced tricks. If you’re wondering how do scammers get your information, here are the most common and dangerous ways they collect email addresses.
Data Breaches
A data breach can occur when a website, service, or company is compromised and the user data is leaked or stolen. This often includes usernames, email addresses, and in some cases, passwords. Cybercriminals will buy this information in bulk on the Dark Web.
Email Harvesting Bots
Automated bots, sometimes referred to as web crawlers, are used by scammers to individually traverse websites, online directories, forums, blog comments and even PDF files looking for email addresses. These bots are designed to find the “@” symbol and collect anything that looks like an email.
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Social Media Exposure
Social platforms are abundant with personal data. If you have posted your email address in your bio, resume, or anywhere in a post or comment, it could be an instant pick for a scammer. Additionally, even if you didn’t post it, you may have tagged friends or co-workers in documents or posts who posted your email. Business platforms, in particular, like LinkedIn, are enticing to attackers who scrape profiles and build a corporate email format.
Fake Websites and Credential Harvesting Pages
Scammers create fake websites that impersonate trusted brands. The fake websites convince people to enter their email addresses through fake sign-ups, login pages, or password reset forms to harvest credentials.
Once submitted, the company collects the data to use for phishing. Often, victims do not know they even gave their email until they receive an email from the scammer asking for their email address and trying to trick them!
Social Engineering Attacks
Social engineering is the manipulation of people to share sensitive information. A scammer might impersonate a colleague, IT support, or even a vendor and ask you to “confirm” your email address, or worse, a username and password.
Lesser-Known but Still Dangerous Methods
Some techniques aren’t used as widely but can be just as effective. These lesser-known methods often go unnoticed by users until it’s too late.
Dictionary Attacks
In a dictionary attack, scammers use software to guess valid email addresses by combining popular names, company domains, and number sequences. For example:
This technique is especially common in large organizations, where email formats are predictable.
Fake Newsletters and Subscription Traps
Scammers will also create fake newsletter sign-up pages, eBooks, event invitations, or free tools just to collect email addresses. Once a user enters that information, it is just added to a database of email addresses for future phishing campaigns.
Online Contests and Giveaways
Everyone loves giveaways – scammers love this too! They will promote fake contests and giveaways. These are commonly promoted in social media ads (or pop-ups), offering fake prizes for an email address.
Email Retargeting
Many websites use tracking tools in digital marketing, and sometimes some third parties scrape user behaviour to retarget users via ads or emails. Although this may not be illegal, unethical companies harvest emails without consent and may expose email lists to bad actors.
The Role of the Dark Web in Phishing
The Dark Web is a shadowy place on the Internet where stolen data is traded. You can buy email addresses, passwords, and complete identities, even in bulk. Most of the time, phishing scammers (identity thieves) will use these data sets to perform their phishing attacks.
Once the scammers collect your emails (from data breaches, scraping, or social engineering), they sell them on the Dark Web, part of the Internet that operates anonymously, enabling illegal activity.
How to Protect Your Email Address from Scammers
Use Strong and Unique Passwords
Do not use the same password for all your accounts. Apply complex passwords that include numbers, special characters, and a mix of both uppercase and lowercase letters. You can use a password manager to help store and create strong passwords.
Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Two-factor authentication (2FA) can prevent unauthorized access to your information even if your email address or password is compromised because 2FA requires that a second form of verification be provided (such as an SMS code or access through an authentication app).
Avoid Posting Your Email Publicly
You should never put your personal or business email on a public forum, website, or social media profile unless necessary. If you have to share your email, you should consider getting a separate public-facing email.
Verify before Click
Remember to always double-check the sender’s address and be extra careful if you receive an email that says to urgently complete something or to verify anything. Hover over links where possible to preview if the link destination is an actual link from the sender.
Use Advanced Spam Filtering
Use the spam protection feature that comes with your email client as well, and think about using domain protection. A DMARC solution will make sure that any email that is not from your domain, but is using your domain, is blocked from entering your organization’s inbox. DMARC will help stop spoofed emails before you ever get to read them.
What to Do If a Scammer Has Your Email Address
Concerns that your email has been hacked already? Don’t worry. If a scammer has gotten hold of your email address, here’s what you can do:
Change Your Password Right Away
Change your email password and all account passwords associated with that email. Be sure each new password is strong and unique.
Turn on Two-Factor Authentication
Enable 2-Factor Authentication on your email and other important accounts to help prevent unauthorized logins.
Report the Email
Report the phishing email to your IT team, email provider, or some type of government cybercrime portal. Reporting helps protect others and may help with the tracking of scammers.
Check You Accounts
Watch your inbox and other accounts connected to that email address for unusual activity, password reset requests and other suspicious emails.
Clean Up Unused Accounts
Old sign-ups also pose a risk. If you’ve signed up on random sites, websites and newsletters, then unsubscribe and delete those accounts.
Final Thoughts
Your email address is frequently your first point of entry into your online identity. Once a scammer has your email address, they can use it for deception, fraud, and data theft in a variety of ways. Learning how phishing scammers can gather and take advantage of your email address is your first step towards defending against them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: 1. How do scammers send emails as if they came from my address?
Ans: Scammers may have either hacked your account or they are simply using a method called email spoofing which allows them to make it look like messages were sent from your address. Having email security like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC can help stop unauthorized senders.
Q: 2. What can someone do with my email?
Ans: A scammer could do a lot with just your email. They could send phishing emails, try to reset passwords for accounts, and email your contacts. If your email is associated with services, they may try exploitation like identity theft or fraud.
Q: 3. How can I check to see if my email has been breached?
Ans: You can use online tools such as data breach monitoring services to check if your email has been part of a known breach. These companies usually provide suggestions to help you secure your accounts.
Q: 4. Can scammers get access to other accounts linked to my email?
Ans: Yes. If you are using the same password or poorly constructed recovery options, a scammer could reset those passwords and gain access to just about anything from banks to social media and cloud storage. Ensure you have unique passwords for every account, and enable two-factor authentication (2FA).
