As some readers are aware, Progressive Alaska and my gmail accounts were hijacked for a while this morning. A lot of friends - most of the people in my gmail directory - got requests for money, because I had "lost my wallet in London." I didn't.
I'd love to be in London right now, but I'm sitting in my office in Anchorage.
Anyway, if anyone gets a message purporting to be from google stating that if you don't provide a lot of personal information - name, country of origin and account password - and then your gmail stops about 36 hours later (like mine did) - don't fall for it!
Special thanks from friends and colleagues who managed to either contact me, help get the word out, or who had suggestions.
5 comments:
hmmmm
There have been similar emails going out to yahoo accounts. Those of you who receive them and know how should look at the full header information of the receipient. Check the IP address and you will see that they appear to be from near Nigeria.
There have been similar scams reported using facebook recently.
If you receive a panicked e-mail, do some quick due diligence, Check the IP address, see if anyone else was copied on the message, evaluate the plausibility of the claimed scenario. A request to reply to another e-mail address should immediately raise a red flag.
Finally, it can be very helpful to google a sentence or two from the e-mail to see if similar scam e-mails have been reported.
Glad you got it sorted, Phil!
Here I thought you were in trouble Phil :) It was an entertaining email. Glad you have a good attitude about it...
Damn, now here I went and sent you 100 bucks nuthin'.
You were probably just too drunk to notice it was a scam.. or maybe you weren't and are just that dumb.
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