Recently, me and at least one other person I know received an obvious scam E-mail that starts off something like this:
We considered your resume to be very attractive and we thought the vacant position in our company could be interesting for you.
Our firm specializes in consultation services in the matter of bookkeeping and business administration. We cooperate with different countries and currently we have many clients in Europe. Due to this fact, we need to increase the number of our destination representatives' regular staff.
This was an obvious scam E-mail, as I don't live in Europe, and have not sent my Resume or CV to anyone recently. So I marked it as spam in Thunderbird and thought nothing more of it.
A week later (today), my inbox was deluged with about 15 E-mail "return to sender" failures over a span of about 20 minutes. The relevant part of an example "Mail delivery failed" message is (most of them are to the .hu domain):
------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------
Return-path: <[email protected]>
Received: from [202.70.75.205]
by autofort1.autofort.hu for [email protected]
id 1XQUZr-0004iq-6L; Sun, 07 Sep 2014 06:59:51 +0200
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
I immediately changed my mail password, just to be safe. Fortunately, I also use E-mail forwarders (aliases) for everything but personal E-mail traffic, so the listed E-mail originator ([email protected]
) is actually a forwarder to [email protected]
, that I normally use for professional type E-mails. Still, I hate to delete ("burninate") this alias just because of some scam-email.
My E-mail account and domain account appear to still be secure, since they are using my forwarder, not my real address, and I checked my domain and all the settings still seem to be in order. So it's somewhat obvious they are using made-up or forged E-mail headers. Possibly related, I googled and found this fraud alert
Is there anything I can do to prevent them from tarnishing my good name (or E-mail address), besides just abandoning this alias/forwarder and shutting it down with a "return to sender" message on it? Is there any way to prevent this type of scam from re-using my E-mail address in this way in the future?