I visited US once, for a week. I went through an E-ZPass controlled interstate once as a passenger, and gave no e-mails to anyone.
Yet, I received "Pending E-ZPass payment" scam for a year.
I have no further comments.
Yet, I received "Pending E-ZPass payment" scam for a year.
I have no further comments.
>Yet, I received "Pending E-ZPass payment" scam for a year.
I think you're overestimating how precise scammers' targeting are. They're playing a numbers game, so they're going to spam every who might have used ezpass, not carefully curate their spam list by buying real time location data from data brokers. I received phishing texts for banks that I don't have accounts for, so next time I get a phishing text for a bank that I do use, I'm not going to think my bank got breached.
I travel a lot due to work. Generally the destinations are the same, but a new country is added now and then. When I go there and come back, I also start to get spam in that country's language.
I currently have English, Spanish, Dutch and Italian spam regularly in my mailboxes. They all started after I visited respected countries, and continue since I still visit them semi-regularly.
That E-ZPass spam started right after I returned from US, continued for a year, ceased and didn't return.
Spammers have better targeting tools than we know.
It's far more likely your email addresses are getting leaked by airlines/hotels (or basically anyone you gave your email to during your travel) than random apps selling your location to data brokers, data brokers being competent enough link those locations back to your email, but somehow too incompetent to know that being in France for a month doesn't mean you're interested in buying French car insurance. The latter isn't impossible, but occam's razor says we should favor the more straightforward explanation.
And no, I don't get car insurance scam. I get generally faster ones, like "you have a package" types...
The rabbit hole is a bit deeper to summarize with a #8, Solingen made Occam's razor.
The best I can think was your location data was sold by a company behind one of the apps on your phone.
Some of my phone apps might have betrayed to me, too, but I have no idea what I had installed at that time.