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A l t e r E g o

Advertising reaches new low, advert emails from your email contacts!

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Emails pretending to be from someone you know that include links to things "you may be interested in" are now a thing.

I got my first one today. It appeared to be from someone in my contacts but inside the email was a link to a CNN page filled with snake oil promises for some dietary supplement I have never heard of before.

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What about this, AE.....you know those emails from foreign countries that ask for money for all kinds of personal catastrophes? Well I received an email from a friend saying something sad had happened. This was an out of state friend

and professional colleague so I emailed her back to say I was praying for her and to let me know if there was anything I could do.  As I left work it occurred to me to just call her....and lo, nothing was wrong! Plus, she had been getting calls all day from friends, and was in the process of investigating how she had been hacked.

The next day I received an email reply to the email I had sent, supposedly replying from my friend. According to the letter my friend was stuck in a foreign country was ill, and needed thousands of dollars, and oh...she was so embarrassed to have to ask for this money.

Now that reply site has been sent out to our IT people as a phishing site. But there is no restraint on these people.

You just got an America version!

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1 hour ago, mj said:

What about this, AE.....you know those emails from foreign countries that ask for money for all kinds of personal catastrophes? Well I received an email from a friend saying something sad had happened. This was an out of state friend

and professional colleague so I emailed her back to say I was praying for her and to let me know if there was anything I could do.  As I left work it occurred to me to just call her....and lo, nothing was wrong! Plus, she had been getting calls all day from friends, and was in the process of investigating how she had been hacked.

The next day I received an email reply to the email I had sent, supposedly replying from my friend. According to the letter my friend was stuck in a foreign country was ill, and needed thousands of dollars, and oh...she was so embarrassed to have to ask for this money.

Now that reply site has been sent out to our IT people as a phishing site. But there is no restraint on these people.

You just got an America version!

In the past, I'm sure I had mentioned my neighbor and good friend Norm. He passed away in 2012 and his wife unfortunately followed in 2014. But around 2010 or 2011, she received a call from someone who started off the call by calling her 'Grandma' and going on to say that she was Norm's son (he had children from a previous marriage). "Scott", went on to explain that he was in the Bahamas or maybe it was the Virgin Islands, and was arrested for being drunk at a concert and the local police were demanding $2,000 as a bribe to let him go. "Scott" also asked "Grandma" (she was really his step-mother), not to tell his father anything about it. Now keep in mind, the real Scott lived in Alaska at the time and would never call her 'Grandma'.

Being a very stressful situation, she dutifully went to the Western Union office and wired him $2,000. After she got home, 'Scott' called back and said that they were demanding $5,000 more or they'd charge him and he'd spend a year in their jail.

At this point, she was very upset, and told Norm (my friend). He immediately realized that it was a scam, but just to double check, he called his son in Alaska and sure enough, he was safe and sound in his home.

The $2,000 was gone for good, an expensive lesson to learn for Norm's wife, but a lesson learned. These sorts of scams will never end, and will only get more creative.

I've read of the 'Can you hear me' scam, where someone will call you and the first question is 'Can you hear me?' or some other question that will get you to give a 'Yes' or other affirmative answer. They're recording your voice saying 'Yes', and later add it to a recording where it sounds like you're agreeing to buy something or pay some bill or something of that sort.

You can, of course, fight it. But like identity theft, it can be time consuming and expensive.

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Happy to hear the scam was discovered before something really bad happened, @mj.

 I like to think my reluctance to get entangled in all the social webs has helped protect us from these scams. With our private information about to go on the auction block to the highest bidder, our taking care against scammers will be more important than ever.

@VaBeachGuy I get that 'can you hear me' call at least once a month on my land line but since I always let the answering machine answer they always hang up soon after getting no response from me.

One time, I was expecting a call so when one came in I just absently picked it up. Once I became aware it was a scammer I shouted: I am reporting you to the do not call register! and hung up. Never saw that number in the caller id list again.

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