YIKES! Sudden AVALANCHE of spam!!!

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  flashbackdallas · Member · Mar 28, 2017 at 4:12 pm

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  In the past few minutes, I’ve begun to get bombarded with spam — over TWO THOUSAND in just a few minutes!! How do I stop this?!!!!

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  flashbackdallas · Member · Mar 28, 2017 at 4:16 pm

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  And it just keeps going!

  I don’t think I can add a screenshot here. I’ve uploaded one to my Google drive: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6S9KX1cmUKsRkg5ZEprb1RWNEE

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  flashbackdallas · Member · Mar 28, 2017 at 4:17 pm

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  I have never used a user name with my name plus a year — which all of these emails suggest I’ve used.

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  flashbackdallas · Member · Mar 28, 2017 at 5:54 pm

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  And they’re STILL coming! Almost all are notifications from WordPress blogs — my email is being used to register and subscribe to hundreds and HUNDREDS of blogs. Does anyone have any idea how to stop this?

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  staff-zinnia · Staff · Mar 28, 2017 at 7:39 pm

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  Hi –

  I’ll investigate this. Please confirm which site you are having the problem on.

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  flashbackdallas · Member · Mar 28, 2017 at 10:26 pm

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  I thought it was the FlashbackDallas.com site, but I checked that blog’s gmail account (email sent to that address is redirected to my personal email), and it’s free of all this spam. It appears to be my *personal* email which has been used to register and subscribe to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of blogs — all (or most) of which are WordPress blogs.

  If my personal email has been hacked, why is it only targeting WP sites?

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  flashbackdallas · Member · Mar 29, 2017 at 1:03 am

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  I have discovered that I was the victim of someone hacking my phone company account. They fraudulently ordered an iPhone on my account, and this flood of emails (a scam I’d never heard of) is set off to distract the owner of the email address from seeing the invoice/order confirmation of whatever it is they’ve bought — it just gets lost in the huge pile of emails (I’ve currently received over 4,000 today!).

  I still don’t know why almost every notification email I’ve received is from a WordPress account that has been “subscribed to” by an automated scam bot. Surely this is some sort of security breach that needs to be looked into.

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  staff-zinnia · Staff · Mar 29, 2017 at 2:44 pm

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  Hi –

  Thank you for those details. Your email account would not have to be compromised to be submitted to a website. If someone knew your email address they could sign you up as a follower.

  That said, I’ve reviewed our email records to verify that these were note WordPress.com sites.