I’m very careful with privacy and security so I was surprised I got an obvious phishing email from “American Express”. I reported the email and moved on only to get another one today. I checked haveibeenpwned and it came back clear. I have never gotten a phishing email before the other day. As for the senders, they all came from generic IT sounding email addresses. They obviously weren’t American Express.
If you have signed up on dubious websites with questionable privacy policy, many of them legally sell this data to “data brokers” who then sell it to anyone willing to pay. This happens more than you’d think, for example in 2019 it was reported California DMV makes $50 million a year selling users information. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-driver-data/
One neat trick is to signup for services with an email like name+website@domain.com, that way if you ever get spam you’ll know where you have been compromised.
I’ve used this many times before. But this is so well known I wonder, why wouldn’t spammers/scammers just remove the “+” and trailing characters before “@“?
True. A more reliable way to achieve this is to buy a domain and use addresses in the form websitename@your.domain.
Information might also be leaked through data breaches. An email is not a particularly hard thing to find, or even guess.
A spammer could easily just have a computer iterate through all possible combinations of emails and usernames, and shotgun it.
Especially for a name like OP’s. If their email is a similar name, it wouldn’t be difficult for generate one that is also two words.
