Spam Email That Includes Your Real Street Address

A new type of phishing email that includes the recipient’s home address has been received by thousands of people.

Security experts warned clicking on the link would install malware. The email has good spelling and grammar and the exact home address, not the way addresses are written by those autofill sections on web pages, but the way people write their address.

One of the victims says: “My tummy did a bit of a somersault when I read that, because I wondered who on earth I could owe £800 to and what was about to land on my doormat.” Some people quickly realise it was a scam and did not click on the link. Some people clicked.

A spokesman for British Milerain Co Ltd, a waxed cotton fabric manufacturer, told that the firm “had more than 150 calls from people who don’t owe us money.”

And a spokeswoman for Manchester shelving firm Greenoaks said: “My colleague took a call from an elderly gentleman and he was very distressed because his wife had had one of these emails.”

Dr Steven Murdoch, principal research fellow at the department of computer science at University College London, told: “Most likely it was a retailer or other Internet site that had been hacked into and the database stolen, it then could have been sold or passed through several different people and then eventually it got to the person who sent out these emails.”

He said that the email bore the hallmark of previous phishing attempts from gangs in Eastern Europe and Russia, clicking on the link would install malware such as Locky virus, which is a form of ransomware that will encrypt files on Windows-based computers and then demand a fee to unlock them.