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Why Contact Pictures in Your Email Address Book Can Be Dangerous

It’s kind of fun to see a friend’s smiling face as their email address picture when you open an email from them. But there is a little-known danger to having a contact picture associated with someone who sends you email. That’s because those contact images are displayed even if the email is from someone who has hijacked your friend’s email address, which happens all the time with phishing, scamming and spamming. It’s called “spoofing”, and any scammer or spammer can put your friend’s email address as their own “from” address. What this means is that any scammer can send you email “from” your friend’s email address, and your email program will display the address book picture you have set as the contact image. And many, if not most, people, seeing their friend’s email address image in that email, will have a false sense of security that the email really is from their friend. It’s as if the address book image being present in the email somehow proves it’s really from their friend. Well, it doesn’t. And here are real-life examples to prove it.