NJres

Just a heads up. I got an email from a very old acquaintance offering me photos. I thought probably photos of his athlete son so I was interested so I clicked and was brought to a site that required registration. I didn't want to register so stopped there. My wife got the same email but she stopped the registration process when they asked for her AOL password (smart lady!). Clearly a phishing scam, but it is tempting because the email will come from someone you know. They use the registration info to access your email account and send the email to everyone in your address book.

So, if you get such an email, even from someone you know, do yourself a favor and delete!


(I did a little googling and found recent posts about this on fraud monitoring type websites, so I suspect there is a lot of this going around right now)

meredesfilles

I got an email from a daughter of a friend two days ago. I opened it because I had seen her at graduation and thought that she might have pictures for me. When they asked for my email password I deleted it.

The next day, I received two emails from people that I was on a committe/email list four years ago. I sent out an email to friends warning them about this....not in time for three of my friends who signed up.

I'm glad that I didn't sign up.....it has become a nuisance for several of my friends.

thumper1

I got two of these emails from total strangers...hit the "report spam" button.

ellemenope

I was the one whose email account was compromised about a month ago. All of my contacts in one of my major email accounts received a spam email from me using my email account. Then all of my contacts were deleted (very inconvenient). Trust me, I haven't fallen for a phishing scam. I am very careful.

I read an article in PC World that said that sometimes you haven't done anything wrong. You haven't caught a virus, you didn't give out your password via a phishing scam, you didn't use a public computer that had a password catcher on it. Sometimes, other sites you have registered for are not as secure as they should be and info can be captured off of that site.

Many sites use your email address as your user name and many people use the same password in multiple places. So someone could have hacked into that commercial site and decided to try your info out to see if it would open your email site.



A big piece of advice that I got from that experience--have a password for your email account which doesn't show up anywhere else. Use answers to security questions that can't be guessed.

Mother's maiden name: Sp7_4v2 (Sorry Mom)

northeastmom

Somebody I know recently tried using this site to send pictures to me. I knew that the pictures were there, but have no idea as to how to use this site. I stopped at the point where it asked for my AOL password! Somehow I am partially registered now, bc someone else that we know who uses this site "tagged" me and "tagged" my husband (whatever that means). We don't even know how to respond to being tagged, and we have not been able to view pictures from the person who meant well and was trying to send pictures for us to view, and could not view photos of the person who "tagged" us.

seiclan

I have gotten these emails twice from elderly family members. Each time I delete the email and notify the sender of this spam. This site is obnoxious.

MichaelNKat

If you go to the Snopes website and search for it, there's a pretty good detailed explanation of what it is and how it works. According to scopes, there are no viruses or destructive malware involved. The site uses your email contact list and any personal info you give when you register to then use your name and email address to market commercial activity, including soliciting everyone in your contact list to join the site. The terms of service that you agree to when joining specifically consent to this. It stinks!

FallGirl

Thanks for the heads up NJres.

I just got an email from an address that looks like the last name of someone at D's dance studio. It said something about Susan sending you pictures. I thought it might be a picture from one of D's competitions, then remembered your post and deleted.

VeryHappy

The best/worst phishing scam I know of was when DH got an e-mail allegedly from someone he knows (and talks to almost daily) telling him that he was stranded in some city and needed $500 (or whatever amount) wired to him immediately. DH knew the person was in fact out of town, but at a different place than the e-mail claimed. Long story short, it was bogus. But very very clever.

busyparent

just received one today!

snowball

I got one Thursday, looked at the site, but did not register. The person who's email address was used sent a follow up email the next day. She explained she did not send an email with pictures, so to please ignore.

lamom

received one last night. They used the name from a pharmacy listserver.

Karen Colleges

Just got one. It's a shame-- I haven't heard from the 'sender' in years, and was (momentarily) so pleased. I'll send her a note by a different route to give her the heads up.....

gosmom

Just received one today! Luckily, since memory is fading and couldn't remember if I knew this person (it sounded familiar...), Gosdaughter is home and declared it spam....

galoisien

It's called email spoofing.

A red flag is when the sender address domain doesn't match the domain of the server it came from. (Sometimes this is legitimate, e.g. gmail will send an email linked to a non-gmail address but google itself has to send the email from their servers.)