I received an e-mail a couple of days ago purporting to be from Newton Commercial, who make classic car interiors. The e-mail was confirmation of an order that I had no recollection of placing so I did the usual thing when I get a suspicious e-mail and checked the senders details (usually scams are obvious because the return e-mail address looks dodgy) and then went to the Newton web site.

The e-mail addresses matched (sales@newtoncomm.co.uk) , but I phoned the company anyway. They are aware that someone has hijacked their e-mail and they are investigating.

Just thought that I would mention it here in case anyone is dealing with Newton, which I am sure is a reputable company. I would recommend that you phone them to confirm the legitimacy of any communications that you get from them for a while.

They are aware of the problem and are investigating

[Edited on 4/9/14 by SteveWallace]

I got a similar scam e-mail yesterday (purporting to be from a kite making firm).
As I had no dealings or order alarm bells rang.

I noticed the e-mail had a .arj document attached (similar to a zip file) - needless to say I did not open it!

e-mail was promply deleted.

Search on web gave similar recent examples.

There is a huge amount of this sort of crap around at moment, my wife's email is badly affected but it rarely gets past the filters. I blacklisted 12 domains that had hit her filters with crap this morning alone.
Her email address got picked up as a target after some of her clients that got hit hard earlier in the year.
It is clearly a full time job for somebody as the crap only arrives Monday to Friday..
Currently we have 4 layers of filtering but very little gets past the mail box filtering on our mail boxes at the domain hosting company we use.