phishing scam

[charal]

We have received two emails indicating we have made a huge purchase on a credit card.  We didn't and it was addressed to "Dear Customer"....It also had a huge number of other verizon.net customers as addressees.  Has your system been hacked or is the database compromised?  How can they get so many addresses  in what appears to be alphabetical order?

[Anthony_VZ]

There were no alerts to inform tech support that any breach was made. People involved in the spam business have massive lists of email accounts that can be arranged and sorted easily. When the owners of the list sells it to others, they can sell either the entire list or portions of the list.

[somegirl]

---

@charal wrote:

We have received two emails indicating we have made a huge purchase on a credit card.  We didn't and it was addressed to "Dear Customer"....It also had a huge number of other verizon.net customers as addressees.  Has your system been hacked or is the database compromised?  How can they get so many addresses  in what appears to be alphabetical order?

---

Odds are that this is what is known as "dictionary spam" - Spammers send to a machine-generated list of common email addresses at a given domain, knowing that at least some of them will be valid addresses. Typically they start at the beginning of the list until they hit their recipient limit, then send another with the next chunk of addresses.

Keep in mind that it doesn't matter how many of those addresses don't work, spammers only need a tiny success rate to make their effort worthwhile.