Do not open emails from janet Hatton

[Franswallow]

This is a genuine problem, I'm not being unpleasant!
Janet has had her personal email hacked into and the following message sent, I opened it and got the dreaded blue screen, the computer seems to have recovered itself (I hope) but just delete any message titled "Urgent I need your help"

This is the message:


Am sorry I did not inform you about my Trip to Africa for a program called Empowering the Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, and Lack of Education, the program is taking place in three major countries in Africa which are Ghana, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. But I am presently in Lagos Nigeria now Unfortunately all my money and traveling documents were stolen in my hotel room during a robbery incident in the hotel where I lodged. I am so confused now; I don't know what to do, that is why I decide to contact you for urgent assistance. I need soft loan of £1.400 Pounds? Please I want to use it to sort-out my hotel bills and buy my return ticket. I promise as soon as am back from this trip I will refund the money back to you, But if you can not come up with the amount Please send what you can afford through Western Union with the info below.

Name: Janet Hatton

Address: 24 BROAD STREET ,LAGOS ISLAND

Zip code: 2341

Country: NIGERIA

Test Question: To whom?

Answer:

Amount send £?

Once you have it sent, please send me the money transfer control number (MTCN), with details used in sending it. I will be expecting your mail as soon as possible

Regards,
Janet

[Beneficial Dictator]

This message if opened seems to send itself to everyone in the recipients address book. So don't open it just delete it straight away. Janet is now changing her email address.
Apologies that many of you will have got a copy of this from me as I opened the message & even though I deleted it straight away the damage was done.
Apologies from Janet & myself.

[Beneficial Dictator]

Janet here on Craigs Computer so hence his avatar appears.
Sorry everyone - my email address has been hijacked/scammed and I cannot now even access it myself. I have spent the evening trying to get it back to no avail. Please delete any emails from my old address. I have a new address - please delete the old one from your contacts and mark as unsafe. Not clear how it happened but was a complete accident. John will you please edit my details on the Harriers contact page. I am attempting to gather addresss to forward my new address to - title -Important Janet's new email address.
Sorry again
I am not in Nigeria and do not require large amounts of cash ( on the other hand....)
Janet

[Stephen Watts]

Craig, I'm no expert but it really is a bad idea to put your email address on the internet in the way you have above unless you know it is protected. I'm sure John can advice, but if you are not sure try and encode it in some way, for example 'janet dot hatton at hotmail dot com' or put in some extra characters and then tell people to remove them when replying. It stops the email collecting thingys getting hold of them if the site doesn't encript them in someway. I'm sure someone else can elaborate on this, but in the meantime it may be a good idea to edit the email address you have just published to the world.

[philjan]

Sorry to hear you've been hacked in this way J & C. I did get the offending message. Again I'm no expert but concur with SW's comments above. Also, sadly hotmail (being a Microsoft product) is (a) inherently poor security-wise, and (b) a common target for anti-large-corporation-cyber-tinkerers and mischief-makers. The prevalence of Windows-based products in the market means there are more Windows viruses/hacks/worms etc targetted at Microsoft than any other corporation. I wish I'd stayed an AppleMAc user! But as a compromise, I'm with googlemail. Sorry, I wouldn't use hotmail.

[janet hatton]

Thanks Stephen, you are right of course. I was in a bit of a tizz yesterday trying to sort things out and should have been more careful. I have edited the previous post.
Janet

[thebunyans]

If anyone wants to increase email security I can add them to the contacts page on the main site. This then has a web based email form that can be used by people to contact you. Saves putting email addresses directly on the website/forum.