It was my teacher in school who told me how to do it. We had a lesson in source criticism so that we would be harder to fool later. One thing we got to do was visit a site where you could send mails and fake the sender. Instead of using your own adress you could use any you wanted. We got told to try it out, and so we did. Worked fine, except for that it ended up in the trashcan.
When I came home I decided to use it a bit more and pull a prank on some friends of mine.
Let's call the two people in the prank Sara and Eric to make it easier, I'll keep this a bit anonymous just in case the public authority, that I wont specifiy, would read this.
Eric is a friend of mine who works at the public authority at a quite high postion, quite young but made a career fast so he's "up there". Sara is another old friend who is studying at another university and got a dog named Charlie. They both know each other well so I decided to fake a mail from Eric to Sara. Sadly I didn't have Erics address and asking him would probably make him suspicious so I googled for it. I ended up finding his mail at the authority and figured that it'd do. I had Saras address already.
So I copied Erics work address and wrote something like:
"Hey Sara,
Here comes a funny challenge. We all need to get in mood for Valentines day so write a short story about Charlie going on a date. Then send your text to me and forward this challenge to three other people that you know have pets.
Best regards
Eric"
I wanted to be sure that Sara had checked her trashcan and seen the mail but I waited for a week to make asking about it seem less suspicious. Then I sent a message to Sara asking if she'd gotten a mail from Eric about Valentines day in her trashcan too, just like I had.
She answered:
"WARNING, WARNING, It's fake. Deleta it immidiately, from the trashcan too. Someone is trying to hack your computer."
I understood that she and Eric had figured it out so I replied "Oh, really? :)" Then Sara called me. I answered and she kept her act together. She told me that Eric said he wasn't behind it and that Erics boss at the public authority had started an investigation to find out who sent the mail. She told me that it could be very dangerous and that I should delete it immidiately. It took me around five minutes to understand that this was what she really meant and not some act of revenge.
Apparently it's quite serious that a public authority mail gets hacked. The same goes for Saras home mail. As the person behind the fake mail knew the name of Saras dog someone had to have broken into her mail too, and obtained personal information about her by reading her mails. None of them had thought about that I might be behind it all. Eric had told his boss, who's one of the highest of this public authority and that boss started an investigation that went on for hours.
When Sara realised I was behind it she laughed, Eric wrote that he did the same when he heard about it. The only one who didn't laugh is probably whoever worked on this case at the authority. Thankfully Eric is nice enough not to give my name away. My prank did succeed, but perhaps it succeeded too well. My friends and teachers have gotten some quite good laughs about this. The teachers said that it might be one of the strangest things a student has managed to do.
But I really have to say that it was making a mountain out of a molehill, a very large mountain.