A Virginia woman's inbox exploded with 600+ emails — scammers were hiding a $1,200 fraudulent purchase

A Virginia woman was recently hit with a bizarre flood of more than 600 emails — but what initially looked like an annoying spam problem was actually a smokescreen for something much more serious.

According to The Washington Post , which interviewed the woman anonymously, the avalanche of messages was designed to bury a warning from her bank about a fraudulent $1,200 laptop purchase. Then came hundreds more emails over the next 24 hours.

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The woman hadn't signed up for the newsletters, promotions and other messages that were suddenly clogging her inbox. And at first, it looked like nothing more than an especially aggressive burst of spam. But the flood of emails wasn't random — it was a scam.

Cybersecurity experts call the tactic "email bombing," or "subscription bombing," and it's designed to overwhelm your inbox while scammers hope you'll miss an important fraud alert, password-reset notification or other warning hiding in the chaos.

The idea behind email bombing is straightforward: bury the important stuff under a mountain of other messages.

Scammers can use automated tools to sign an email address up for hundreds of websites, newsletters and online services in a short period of time. Suddenly, the inbox is filling up with welcome messages, subscription confirmations and other emails that may look perfectly legitimate.

That can make it much harder to spot the one message that actually matters.

In the case highlighted in The Washington Post , many of the emails came from real organizations, including newsletters, charities and small businesses. They weren't necessarily the kind of obvious junk that would get caught by a spam filter, either, so they landed right in the woman's inbox.

Buried among them was a legitimate fraud alert from her bank.

And while she's sorting through hundreds of emails trying to figure out what's going on, a scammer may have a window to make an unauthorized purchase, change account information or get into another account.

The volume can be staggering, too. Security firm Proofpoint says subscription-bombing attacks can deliver more than 1,500 emails an hour — enough to overwhelm an inbox within minutes and bury a critical security alert.