CHARLOTTE, N.C. — How many personal emails do you receive in a day? Probably a lot, especially if you opt-in to advertising.
Many of those emails are likely from stores and restaurants you subscribed to years ago and forgot about. But what if you get an influx of emails from businesses you never subscribed to?
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Constant Contact said there’s actually a name for that. It’s called “subscription bombing.”
Essentially it’s a form of abuse caused by spambots submitting fraudulent information through forms on websites.
"Scammers are using different scripts, and running them on the internet and finding different newsletters, forums, subscription services, things you can use your email address to sign up for," O’Rork said.
But what's the end game here? O’Rork said criminals are trying to cause confusion.
"Scammers want to bury your actual legitimate emails in the event they have access to your personal information already," O’Rork said. "So if there's account alerts, banking, information, notifications, they're wanting to potentially bury all that information. So you actually have no idea what's going on."
So what can you do if you find yourself a victim of this so-called “spam bomb?”
O’Rork said unfortunately, you can't do a lot.
"You can attempt to contact your email provider to see if they'll help," O’Rork said. "But at the end of the day, you kind of just either have to wait it out, or potentially if it gets bad enough, consider creating a new email account."
Since your email address is already out there in the public domain, O’Rork said there's really nothing you can do to even protect yourself from this.
"So anybody that gets a hold of your email address could do this," O’Rork said.
But what you can do is to find the one email the spammers are trying so hard to bury: The one that lets you know your account has been accessed, without permission, or your password has been changed.
That’s why O’Rork said it's important for people to look through all of those emails, as time-consuming and annoying as it can be.
"You don't just want to delete everything," O’Rork said. "So we do recommend going through it, even though that's going to take some time."
It might be a needle in a haystack, but finding it will set you on a path to securing your accounts, once again.
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