Has email spam gotten smarter?

Lately I have been getting spam/scam emails from addresses using my wife's name, and other friends/contacts. So it says from "Jon Smith" but instead of my email its from a spam/scam email.

Is anyone else getting this from gmail?

Yeah, it's the natural course of things. I barely ever check my spam folder, and even when I do, Gmail is pretty fucking good at detecting phishing attempts.

Spammers have annoyingly been doing that for a while now.

Yep, same here, but I use Yahoo! Mail. It hasn't happened in a while but I've received scam/spam e-mails under the names of friends in my inbox, not spam folder. Not really something I worry about though.