Spam email coming from name of person I know, but with wrong email address

Question

I recently received a spam email as follows:

From: Friend's name <[email protected]>

Subject: Fwd: healthy belly fat loss without starvation

To: Me <[email protected]>`

it's just my advice to you 
[LINK REDACTED]
this amazing weight loss product worked for me and i'm sure it can work for you!

take care, Person I know

This is pretty worrying. The person who purportedly "sent this" has been deceased for a while now. The email address it was sent from was [email protected]@37.53.219.92 in Ukraine. This was on my optimum (cable provider) email account, and I'll be honest, my password is not particularly secure. I don't use the contacts function of my optimum account, but I have had a few conversations by email with the person that the spammer is trying to spoof.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Solution

There's really nothing you can do about this, but nor is there anything to worry about (presuming you don't follow the link).

Spammers want their spam to rise above the sea of bad emails that you receive, so that you'll trust them and click on the links. To do that, they want their email to appear to come from someone you know. Apparently, at some point this person's contact database was hacked and sold, and now the spammers send email to the person's contacts bearing the person's name (it's becoming harder to spoof the actual email address, but the right name is more effective than nothing).

So, you're likely to continue getting the occasional email from your deceased acquaintance. It's probably not related to the poor password on your Optimum email account, but you probably should change it to something more secure anyway.