A slightly leftfield question for Monday... Recently, someone who I didn't know emailed me out of the blue from a GMail address to my own address. They were apparently trying to establish contact for no obvious reason, almost like sending me an email after meeting in person to exchange details. However, I'd never met them.
Their email had a friendly tone but was a vaguely worded email, with slightly odd turns of phrase which made me suspicious. I periodically receive emails intended for other people with the same name so I apologised and suggested they had the wrong address. I received a couple more emails last week, including from a new but similar address. Today, having switched for no obvious reason to sending via another GMail account with similar username, the sender replied and sent an image which they were implying was of them (an attractive lady). Upon cursory Google image search, this woman was immediately revealed to be a a slightly famous British AV actress in a football stadium at a Liverpool FC game. (Apparently she's an LFC fan!) (clean thoughts please) After disregarding several further attempts to strike up conversation, 'she' stopped emailing. In instances like this - where it appears someone is attempting to run a con or potentially extort/honeytrap or build up to a significant financial fraud via coercion - as they're clearly abusing Google services, how best should a user make GMail aware of this TOS abuse? It feels like just marking as Junk doesn't solve the problem - seems they can just move from one GMail account to another, as it appears they did while emailing me. I couldn't discern any remote / original sending IP details from the headers, though there is some unique GMail identifier which is obfuscated to me. Likewise, the standard Report Abuse form only seems tailored to handle obviously illegal, abusive content and I don't have faith in it being able to handle this more subtle sort of malicious use. What person/department at GMail might accept reports of unusual / suspect abusive usage like this where potential fraud is involved and can more thoroughly investigate and see about restricting access to Google services if they can identify the actual end user?
_______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
