E-mail Attack – Warning

Our law firm’s e-mail server has been the subject of an e-mail attack by a brazen but thin-hided scammer & phisher who used an open SMTP relay server in Argentina to blast out thousands of scam e-mails with a forged “From:” line in the e-mail header makes it appear that the scam e-mail was sent by “Choi Yun <will@willsnyderlaw.com>” with the subject “My late client [sic] last wishes.” These e-mails and any variants are SCAMS, and we encourage recipients of them to dispatch them from their INBOXes with extreme prejudice.

Please be advised that these scam e-mails did NOT originate from the e-mail server of The Law Offices of Will Snyder, PLLC. Our law firm’s e-mail server has NOT been compromised. Our domain name is secured with a SPF record in DNS that specifies the one and only IPv4 address from which authorized e-mail from our law firm are sent.

Unfortunately, because the scammer & phisher is using an open SMTP relay to pump out his scam e-mails, if that open SMTP relay attempts to deliver an e-mail to an invalid e-mail address, the MAILER-DAEMON on the open SMTP relay server sends an automatic e-mail to _ME_ saying that the scam e-mail was undeliverable to the non-existent e-mail address. So, if the scammer & phisher tries to send his scam e-mail to 1,000s of invalid e-mail messages, the open SMTP relay server sends me 1,000s of automatic rejection messages. We also have been receiving auto-reply e-mails (e.g., away messages, automatic receipt acknowledgments, etc.) with which we must deal with on our end.