Scam by email today

SleepingJo wrote:

Every single person in my friends contacts has been emailed and it is about buying gift cards. How can we stop this

Welcome to the Internet. Unfortunately.

That usually means one of y'all uploaded their contacts to some scam, or loaded some sketchy app, or their password and their mail got breached, or one of them loaded malware, and got the contact data harvested. Pretty much any service willing to host your contacts for free is going to harvest those and scan your data and to build out the service's contact map, too. This is all part of using Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and other similar services. And it is part of what folks seeking users' credentials are looking for, too.

Pragmatically, learn about and use spam filtering. Mark as Junk, on an iPhone. macOS and Windows have some better and more capable choices for filtering, and some mail providers do better at filtering as junk and some others not so much. Some mail providers include access to SpamAssassin, which does very well at this.

Also learn not to trust all (any) mail messages apparently from within your circle, as it's not at all difficult to use that data to phish others in the circle for scams or access or other details. Sending email addresses are trivial to forge / fake / spoof, just as calling telephone numbers and sending SMS numbers can also be forged / faked / spoofed.

I was getting email from a (dead) friend for quite a while, because their mail provider was (repeatedly) breached and their data harvested. Alas, if my (late) friend ever tries to contact me From Beyond, their email message will probably end up filtered as spam.

It is likely that someone has overshared their contact information. Every social media app, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok will ask to allow them to access your contacts. This greatly increases the chance the your contacts will be shared across the internet if any of those sites get compromised by someone learning the password to any of those account. Once they are out there, it cannot be stopped other than marking each one as junk mail.