I use a unique email address for Pistonheads that I've never given out or used via any other websites. Over the last couple of days I've had about 10 spam emails to this address, all like this...

Countries of interest: UK, Rep. of Ireland, Germany, Austria, Sweden

Our business is concerned with the promotion and development of web media projects
and also partakes in business consisting of alternate power sourcing methods, renewables, and modern green technologies.

We are searching for people who are willing to work and be reliable in the countries listed previously.

Requirements:

- It is necessary that you either own a company or are willing to start one fairly soon
 and retain power of attorney of that company.
- It is required that you are a registered person of one of the countries listed earlier.
- It is also mandated that you are a degree holder from a recognized college.
- English proficiency needs to be roughly ninety percent in order for smooth back and forth communication.
- It is a definite plus on your behalf if you have a solid relationship with a financial institution
 from your community or abroad.
- The amount of help we need will consist of about 3-4 hours per day initially, for the first two months,
 and approximately 2-3 hours a day after that.
- The agreement between our working partnership will last one year, but may extend further to 2 years.

Your day to day activities will involve handling receivables from our selling.

Compensation is commission based, and is associated with the number of items we sell.

Our contacts: Kelsey@marketingcouk.com

Thank You!

I think the point is how can they send us mails at all?

how do they know my email? Or is it the 'Allow other members to send email via the forum' option? Should be unticked by default that.

^^ Top stalking.

As likely it's just random email address generation and they got a hit.

Impossible to guess? I'd love to know what that is.

Has to be.

And makes me feel so much better about being such a miserable sod that he broke his duck just to have a moan

Chap if you get a chance to reply, have you ever replied to the PM's that have been sent to you via other PH'ers from your registered email address?

This ^

thanks for confirming that.

Googling

A quick Google suggests that this scam is pretty wide spread.
Given the spread of PistonHeads it's not beyond the pail to assume that some people have had their accounts compromised by these spammers who've just spammed everyone they've ever had email contact with, including yourself.

Unfortunately as they only appear to have scrapped the email addresses instead of sending the emails from the compromised account there's no easy way to work out who got their account hacked.