Spam Gets Nasty

March 1, 2008 by
Filed under: Lessons Learned 

OK, we all hate spam. I’ve dealt with my share of scams and theft online. The other day though, I received a phishing email that was deceptively clever and had I not been on the ball, might have fallen for.

I consider myself savvy about spotting spam when I see it. I’m not able to fall for the King of Nigeria scam. Last week I received an email from someone purporting to be a lawyer overseas and wanting to know if I was related to an individual. The individual in question was my dad. The email did not have the feel of being of an auto-generated sort. In doing genealogical research on my father, I had used the combination of his name and my email address.

I looked up the lawyer’s name. He existed. I replied back that I was related to the individual. The next day, he answered back, again with an email that appeared to be written in response to what I wrote and not a scam. The email went on to ask for my dad’s birthday and my mom’s maiden name. That’s when the red flag came up. Your mother’s maiden name is often a security question on different sites. Never would I divulge that. Second, and this the scammer couldn’t possibly have known, was that the info I was seeking was at a time when my dad was unmarried. There’d be no point in asking that information.

I looked up the law firm’s website and contacted the lawyer, asking if this was legit. Sure enough, it was fraudulent. The tone of the reply told me that this wasn’t the first time this lawyer’s name had been used in connection with phishing. Another victim.

Because the jerk used my dad’s name (may he rest in peace), that angered me. So, I had to reply back to the scammer and tell him what to do with his offer.

Postscript: The plot thickens. I just received another email today, using a name I haven’t used for years. You just can’t be too careful. A warning should go out to others doing genealogical research to be careful about what they are writing online. You could be giving scammers the ammo to deceive.

Related Posts

Tags: , , , , ,

Comments

If you found this page useful, consider linking to it.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your web site (Ctrl+C to copy)
It will look like this: Spam Gets Nasty

Comments are closed.

Bad Behavior has blocked 311 access attempts in the last 7 days.

ss_blog_claim=b574bc13e92f4e5033673da9646122c5