Saturday, November 6, 2010

Phishing

I was the lucky recipient yesterday of a piece of email claiming to be from the folks at Hotmail warning me that I was about to lose that account.  They desperately needed to know just a few small pieces of information about me in order to keep the account open.  Little minor things, like my date of birth, snail mail address, and, oh, just for shits and gigles, how about a credit card number? 

The message was, of course, riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes.  Does anyone, anywhere, ever fall for this crap?  Someone must, because otherwise why bother, but it still astounds me that anyone would, especially when Hotmail is one of those free services that, like gmail and a bunch of others, never asks a new user to do more than make up a name and a password. 

Then again, when you have a whole generation of people who do most of their writing using odd abbreviations, maybe seeing "plez provide ur. . ." in a supposedly serious piece of correspondence wouldn't cause them to spew coffee all over the keyboard. 

2 comments:

  1. You may get this comment a few times, blogger is hiccuping.

    I keep my old Hotmail account active by checking in about once a month but I haven't used it for years.

    Why do I keep it active? In my delusions I tell myself that there are old saved things in it that I may want access to someday in the future.

    Not that I've ever looked back to look for any of them.

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  2. The polls say she can't win. I betcha Palin thinks she can't lose.

    Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if she did win. Either way, I'm not putting any of my money on any outcome.

    Any extra money I have goes towards bullets and rice.

    ReplyDelete

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