How do they work?
Scammers will either gather your personal information from publicly available sources, or will simply buy this information from hackers.
They will gather information like your full name, email address, phone number, physical address and bank details.
Besides all this, they will also collect information about your PayPal account, Amazon, eBay or any other e-commerce account they can get their hands on.
What happens next?
Once they have all your info available, the next step is simple and obvious - they will go on a shopping spree with your money.
This really depends on what info they found, so let’s take them one by one.
In case they got access to your PayPal account, they will use it at the checkout on whatever retail website they want.
If they got into your Amazon, eBay or other shopping account, it’s most likely you have your payment info saved there, so this will make it even easier for them to shop.
What are the signs of a spam bomb?
These scammers are pretty smart. They know that you will get an email confirmation after every purchase, so the next step is to flood your inbox with junk.
Like I said, they have automations in place that enables them to send you 1000s of emails in just a few minutes.
This is done to make it as hard as possible for you to find that legitimate email among the mass of spam. It’ll be like trying to find the needle in the haystack. It’s almost impossible to go through over 1000 emails in time to stop and cancel their order, and they take advantage of this.
Finding 1000 unread emails in your inbox, does create a sense of panic, and because of this, all logic goes out the window, which is exactly what the scammer wants. They just play with your mind to get as much time as possible to finalise their transactions.
But it’s important to keep calm and understand what’s going on.
If this happens to you, and you manage to catch it in time (if the spam hasn’t stopped yet), then you can still put a stop to them.
What can you do?
There are a few things you can do if this happens to you:
1. Check all your accounts (bank, PayPal, Amazon, eBay etc) and see if there are any suspicious or unknown transactions
2. Go through the emails in your inbox and try to find one related to a purchase, transaction or funds transfer you don’t recognise
How can you prevent this?
There are 3 important things you can do to reduce the risk of going through a spam attack:
1. Delete your personal information from old accounts you don’t use - this will prevent your data from getting into the hands of hackers and scammers
2. Delete your info from data brokers - as you may know, data brokers collect, buy and sell people’s personal data. This information is incredibly cheap, and can also be bought by bad actors
3. Secure your inbox by whitelisting senders you need - this rule will help you remove any spam or junk from your inbox, while keeping only the important emails. This way, even if you get 1000 spam emails, they will be automatically deleted, and that one important email will be a lot easier to find
A much easier way of protecting against spam bombs/attacks, is Sentrya. Sentrya makes it really simple for you to close old accounts and delete your information from any company in the world, remove your data from data broker’s data base, and whitelist your favourite senders.
I am the perfect example of how well Sentrya works, because:
- I went from getting over 300 emails in a week (including spam and junk) to only 25 important emails
- I deleted over 3000 old emails in 2 minutes
- I removed my data from over 20 old services
- I deleted my information from over 40 data brokers (so far - still have about 160 to go through)
You can use Sentrya for free for 14 days, and the monthly subscription is less than your daily Starbucks :)
Thank you for reading this, and I hope it will better prepare you in case you’ll be going through a spam attack. Don’t forget to share it with your friends - you never know who you’ll help.
Stay safe❤️
