I received an email yesterday apparently from someone who I vaguely know (let's call him "John Smith"). Subject line was "Urgent Help Needed (John Smith) and the one-line message just read "I'm having problems here and need your help Urgently/Financially. Can I ask you a Favour?" No hyperlinks, just a flat text email.
It was obviously dodgy, but I couldn't immediately figure out what the scam was. I tried hitting 'Reply', and saw that the message was set to reply to John... except, oh no it wasn't - it was set to "John.Smithh1 @btinternet.com" rather than " snipped-for-privacy@btinternet.com". So presumably my reply of "Oh no John, how awful, how can I help" would have been met with a second email of "Thanks, please lend me some money by this paypal link" or whatever.
Is this a new scam? Can't say I've ever come across this before. Seems very labour intensive compared to most - the scammers will have to manually create a new account with a similar name to every email account they hijack. And isn't btinternet.com (which was the domain they used) a paid- for account only? If so how does that work?
It does seem odd to me that despite that the apparent sophistication of this scam, that the perp couldn't have spent a bit more time preparing a vaguely plausible and genuine looking message!