How to Protect Your Email Address
I’ve got an email a couple of weeks ago and I just kind of want to touch on the fact that we’re constantly bombarded you know that we’re bombarded by spam but it seems that lately we’re also getting a lot of these emails and we’re getting the solicitor phone calls and stuff telling us that we've won this and we've won this. All that we need to do is just answer a few simple questions or we’ve got to tell them a little bit of personal information and they always make it sound like it’s okay, it’s fine to tell us this information we just need to know how many kids do you have. Well, why do you need that info? For the record, I never filled out a form applying for a cruise at some dinner so that never happened.
So I’ve got this email a couple of weeks ago just saying, “Dear winner emails sweepstakes program this is to inform you that your email address attached to this reference number —–sounds informal has won the prize sum of ₤1,000,000,000” and they even put in bracket just in case I don’t know what a pound is, or how to count.
“In an email sweepstakes program” blah, blah, blah” says that I've won this in the United Kingdom. Here’s the information. Everybody spam away. Be careful. So, this came to me requesting my full name, my address, my contact information, country of origin, occupation and age. Who needs this information? Who’s selling this information to who?
If you get this kind of emails from Jessica Jone, if you get these emails from anybody, just delete them. Don’t ever forward them. And be careful when you’re forwarding emails too because certainly these kinds of emails they’ve try to look professional. This one is a little sloppy but sometimes they’ll you know look really convincing.
I’ve gotten some from PayPal that looked really convincing. But when you look really closer at the headers as somebody who understands that kind of thing, you find out that this doesn’t come from PayPal at all. And if I had have clicked that link in the email, it could have exposed my PayPal information to some third party company or third party hacker that wants my PayPal account information so we got to watch for that kind of stuff definitely.
And if you ever run into something that you’re not too sure about, I would suggest check out Snoops.com, it’s spelled just like it sounds. We can find it in Robbie’s favorites on the website Category5.tv. But if you can’t find it there, then forward it on to me live at Category5.tv. Just put a little message saying, “Hey, I’m wondering if this is legitimate or not” and I’ll be happy to review the email for you and just find out if it’s legitimate or what I think about it.
And certainly also when you forwarding emails to people, I get this all the time where people forward an email thinking it’s okay to forward because the people on my list you know are all people that I know and people who I trust, so you forward an email to let’s say a dozen people and if you’re really good, you blind carbon copy them right? Because that’s what everybody knows to do. You blind carbon copy your friend because they don’t want to receive spam. But when you look at the headers of that email, each one of those people now have an email from your email address.
So, if you think about that, you’ve save your friends from potential spamming but you’ve just added yourself. So, if one of those people has a Trojan virus that’s designed to obtain email addresses from their inbox or if one of those people forwards it on to somebody who has that, your email address is now imbedded in that emails. So if it gets forwarded 100 times, you know about compounding interest and things like that, it’s the same sort of thing. It’s all of the sudden your email address is in a million places so we want to watch it for that because spam is a nasty thing and definitely it’s a big problem in today’s internet world.
John Robert laughing at chain mail in general, but chain mail is a chain mail and you think about you know pyramid schemes and stuff like that. It’s not always that simple, sometimes it’s just a lovely poem. So you forward on that lovely poem. And it if you forwarded it to a 100 people that think it’s lovely as well and you’ll be seeing each one of those, so they’re safe but then your email address is on everyone that they forwarded it too as well as everyone else that day you forward it to.
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