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At the beginning of this month, I took an appointment to get the passport, the date was set for the 24 of August. The 23 of August I received a spam email mimicking the government office which among other things also releases passports. The e-mail which I used for all the procedure is a more personal e-mail which I handle more carefully than the other.

A friend of mine went to the postal office to do some things and the day after got a spam email mimicking that office.

I am sure that in my case, the first e-mail should not have been hacked and from the perspective of the second e-mail, no one could have known of my appointment. The only thing I can think about is some GPS data been leaked. How this kind of attacks works?

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  • The appointment was arranged by email? Also, re the postal office, it was your friend that got the spam mimicking the postal office? If yes, did your friend also arrange an appointment (by email) before going to the postal office?
    – user284677
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 17:53
  • @Spyros the appointment was arranged by email but on the "safe" email. The one who got the spam could be compromised (I don't think so but I am sure the other one isn't), but the two emails get different mail, are registered on different sites and so on. My friend who got the spam mimicking the Postal service, it wasn't something on appointment, he just went in, no trace of appointment on the internet. Could be bias, as suggested... Very strange, can't understand
    – Pleasant94
    Commented Aug 26, 2023 at 9:03

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TL;DR: there is no clear answer what happened here. Only wild speculation based on how such things can happen.

GPS data are not intrinsically linked to email addresses. For an attacker to get your GPS information and link it to your email address they need to have done some kind of compromise first, like compromising your phone. In this case it might also be that they have access to your mail on the phone and can act based on the content of the mail. Or they might have access to your mail by compromising your mail account at the provider. Or the passport office was compromised ... There are far to many options how this could happen in a targeted way.

And then there is the option of just being a coincidence, i.e. that you wonder why you got the mail which fits your situation while ignoring all the other spam mails which don't fit your situation. Such biased view might be amplified by some self-learning spam filter which automatically adjusts to your current communication and what kind of mails you expect and thus should be less treated as potential spam.

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Attackers are not that sophisticated. While advertisers definitely track you and are quite invested in matching your online and physical patterns to better sell you stuff, this is unlikely here.

I think the closest you could get would be if you entered into some third party relationship during the passport application process. Corporate services added in as extras to government programs are increasingly common, though I don't know of any related to passports. If this is truly spam and not just a shady business, I'd chalk this up to coincidence.

It is human nature to observe coincidence as intention. There's even a great James Bond quote on it:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.

Of course, we can't tell for sure.

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