Proud Geek

My dear mother just fell victim to a phishing scam from Reunion.com.  As a result, Reunion.com was able to hack into and steal her entire contact list and email everyone on this list.  My mother had to email an apology to all her contacts.

Rather than explain what happened, I thought I’d reprint an edited version of her email.  It’s chock full of info — now I know where I got my Proud Geek-ness from!

Dear Friends,

I sent out an email two days ago, asking you to join Reunion.com and it seemed a little strange. I did some online searching and apparently this is some kind of phishing scam. Here are some links to information about the scam. You may want to alert your address book to the scam!

http://consumerist.com/380751/­reunioncom-will-scrape-your-­address-book-then-spam-your-­contacts

http://www.ripoffreport.com/­reports/0/348/RipOff0348286.­htm

Here’s the information from this one:

This company should be banned from the Internet. Here’s what happened to me last week. First of all, let me explain that I have been a member of Classmates.com for about 5 years, and it is a very reputable site that does nothing illegal or objectionable.

So when I got an e-mail about Reunion.com in my Hotmail Inbox, I thought it was similar. WRONG! I signed up for the free service, and started typing information into my ‘Profile’, which was quite inclusive, although you could pick and choose what information to give. Here’s what they did: the idea is to keep you online long enough for them to get into your e-mail account and literally STEAL your entire CONTACTS LIST!

How do I know? Luckily, two of my best friends were online at the time, and one sent an e-mail, and one called me on the phone, asking me ‘what’s up with this invitation to join me on Reunion.com?’ I hadn’t been on the site for more than 10 minutes and they had already hacked my e-mail!

Here’s what I did: I immediately deleted all the information I had typed in, logged out, and left the site, and my Firefox preferences prompted me to remove all my personal information from the previous session. It was too late, unfortunately, so I immediately contacted every single person on my Contacts List with a note of apology and explanation that I had been inadvertently, innocently been raided by this disgusting company before I had even finished my profile, and that in no way had I given them permission to contact my friends. I told every person to report the e-mail that they had received as a ‘Phishing Scam’ and then put the original message into their Junk Folder. and delete it.

(For those of you who don’t know what Phishing is, it’s a devious and much more effective cyber variation on the old ‘fishing expedition’ trick, wherein someone asks you a lot of personal questions in order to get something they want: your name, address, even your social security number, and then on to your whole ID.) Hotmail allows you to report any suspicious e-mail as a Phishing Scam; I don’t know about other sites, but Ã…OL makes it very difficult, it seems you can only put it in Spam,which still allows the perp to continue scamming other innocent people.

Anyway, after I did that, I went back into Reunion.com, and sure enough, all my info was still there. I searched around for a way to cancel my membership, and sure enough, the only way is to call the toll free number given, be put on hold forever, and only that after you navigate your way through endless prompts. I am so enraged at these people there is no way to express it. Since my info’s been out there, and even if my membership’s canceled, a whole lot of other people have it, I’ve been getting a lot of junk mail about ‘guess who’s looking for you’, ‘guess who’s got a crush on you,’ etc. etc. I trash them all.

This definitely should be a matter for the FCC, since they are using the Internet to steal people’s information nationwide, maybe even worldwide. Don’t fall for it under any circumstances. Join (((competitor’s name redacted))) instead: you’ll be glad you did.