There’s a new scam in town. Relatively new, anyway. Identity theft and email account hacks have been around forever, but this current scam is, well, very current.

First, the scammer hacks into an email account. This is not as difficult as you might think. All of us feel relatively safe publishing our email address. How else would people get in touch with you? Sure, you could (and should) encode your email address when it appears on your website, but most people don’t know how to do that. (Use a free online encoder like the one at wbwip.com.) This deters robots from culling your email address for spam purposes.

Still, you send out email to your friends, relatives, and business associates. You leave it in the Comments section of many a website. Many thoughtless people send those Photoshopped cat pictures and funny Maxine cartoons to you and thirty other people, failing to put your email address in the blind carbon copy (BCC) field and thereby giving your address to thirty strangers.

So your email address is out there. The scammer then tries to log in to your email account. But you have a password, right? Let’s say the scammer doesn’t know you personally, so he or she cannot guess any password that may have personal relevance, like your pet iguana’s name or your birthday. Doesn’t matter. Hacking programs are available on the Internet - some for free. They’ll find their way in.

Once in to your account, the scammer works fast. First they change your password so that you cannot interfere. Then they send out out a brief urgent message to everyone in your Contact List that you need money immediately for a personal emergency, and to send it via Western Union. (See my blog Western Union: the Scammer’s Dream.)

If anyone writes back to the scammer asking for confirmation or more details, the scammer stonewalls them with short, quick answers emphasizing the emergency nature of the situation and that they’ll explain everything later.

This is where the scammer finds out who your real friends are - and gets a little richer in the process. It’s all over pretty fast - in a few days, tops - but you are left with one big mess to clean up. Maybe these steps will help prevent this disaster from happening to you:

• Limit who you give your email address to
• Encode your web page email
• Change your email account password frequently.
• If Western Union is involved, DO NOT TRUST IT!

Scrud Kelley

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