💪Fighting back💪
Spoofed emails and what to do:
Have you ever gotten an email that says it's from your account?
Does it threaten you with the release of your personal information or naughty photos or videos if you don't do it within 24 hours?
Does this 'hacker' say that they want you to pay them money in bitcoin?
Here's how you can find out who actually sent this email to you!
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First, open up the email!
In some browsers or email apps, it may already have an option to view the 'real' sender by saying 'show original', but if it doesn't, there are ways in gmail and outlook where you can view the 'message source' or 'header data' to an email which contains all of the fancy information sent to servers regarding who sent what, when, where it went, ect.
Here's an article about email headers explained:
Email Headers contain important information and can be useful for improving email deliverability. Learn what they are here.
Now, once you figure out how to access the message source, what you see will probably not bee stuff you recognize, as I mentioned, it's mostly metadata! But there are important things you can find in there tucked away. :)
For example, this email says I sent it to myself:
Then when reading through the header/meta data...Look what I found!
In the Return Path, there is a gmail.com address, and as noted in the above screenshot, it says it was sent from gmail.com. Thus, this email found here must belongs to the scammer!
With that in mind, I copied it, the subject of the email, the header of the email (yes they need alllll of that code, not just some of it!), the body of the email (text that comes under all that code that you see in the email regularly) and reported it here to google. You can report it to outlook too (in app via 'report as phishing email) if it's from a hotmail or outlook account.
When you get threatening emails like this that says it came from your own account, make sure to check out the metadata of the email to find out who it really came from, so you can report it too!
Remember, fighting back not only helps you, it helps others bee safe, too. :)
-Bee
