My SO and I have both noticed that we are getting spam adressed from people with look-alike names as our friends. For example, if I had a friend named “Stephanie Reed”, I might get a spam letter from “Stephanie Reeder”. We are both using different programs to read our email (I use a web-based account, he uses Eudora) and our accounts are through different places (mine is off the web, his is from school).
Is this a new technique, or have we just noticed it? Is it very widespread? Where are they gettting these names from?