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The Family Girl Blogs
(aka "The New Working Girl Blogs") 
Blog #59: Identity Theft! To see all of Bobbie's Family Girl Blogs, click on this link:http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/28818/family-girl-blogs |
A little while ago (June 5, 10:58pm eastern) I got an e-mail from Laika. From out of the blue, actually.
Her e-mail was a little funny - it didn't have a subject-title, it was also sent to four other people that I didn't know (who is DALENEK1 anyway), and the e-mail's content was just a hotlink to an ad about a raspberry diet supplement.
And a few minutes after that, my iPad started asking me to re-confirm/re-enter the passowords for my other e-mail profiles. Hmmm... that's funny. Anyway, I didn't, and nothing bad happened when I didn't re-enter the passwords... Hmmm...
I cannot therefore help but think that Laika and I were being spoofed.
In today's day and age, identity theft is a common thing. It could be something as inconsequential as blind-mailing ads to people's e-mail list, or something as bad as actually using someone's financial details for their benefit. My fear was that this spoofing incident (if indeed it was) was trying to hijack my mailing lists and was phishing for my e-mail passwords.
I cannot be sure, of course. Maybe I am still smarting from that rash of phishing incidents that happened to a bunch of our clients we had to mitigate, and I am therefore being unduly paranoid. Maybe Laika really did send the e-mail coz she felt I could stand to lose a little weight lol! (One of these days, maybe I should send her a picture of me, and she'll probably want to send me ads for Sustacal, Boost or Ensure imstead. heehee!)
Members of LGBT communities have to do a lot of little workarounds just to get by - one of them is the use of pseudonyms and aliases on the net, just to insulate them from people who might hurt them. Moe and I use aliases here in BCTS ourselves (in a way), although I think I slipped a few times with some people, and they proably know my real identity by now (although I appreciate it that they just let it slide, and continue to accept me as Bobbie). But this isn't the same as this e-mail I just got.
I guess the reason I am rambling this way is because I started thinking of identity. Ever since I could recall, I have always identified with being female, and because of this, I have had an, ummm... a less than an ideal life. My outward physical identity was at odds with my "real identity," and this is my life's struggle. Who I was to others was not the same to who I really was.
Identity - it seems to be a sticky subject, at least to those of us who suffer from GID. I suppose, this is part of the reason why we are very particular about labels, titles and names. I know I am. (In fact, I have to get out of the habit of saying I am "TS" when what I am really saying is I am "TG." Thanks to that person who corrected me, by the way: Apologies, dear. I suppose I started using the label "TS" before I knew better, and it became a habit that I have to fix.)
The phrase "identity theft" has a curious kind of appeal for me, because the words kind of gives me the idea that it is actually possible to appropriate someone else's identity, that it is possible to change me into someone else. Gosh! Just imagine!
'Course, in reality this is not exactly how it is, despite what "identity theft" implies. In the real world, it's more humdrum - in the real world it's just falsifying one's identification papers.
But just imagine what it could mean, if you could really steal someone's identity! If it were possible, I'd want to steal Tiffani Thiessen's (the early nineties Tiffani, I mean). lol
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Comments
Unless I am mistaken you are
the victim of a spambot. That is why any E-mail that looks wierd or seems suspect, I send to the Spam folder without opening it.
May Your Light Forever Shine
I've resisted the temptation until now....
...but I DO know your true identity, and I'm revealing it now:
Miss Kelly Kapowski?
Love, Andrea Lena
Duplicate
Sorry - please delete?
Love, Andrea Lena
Duplicate?
Did you just steal your own identity?
Penny :)
I get them almost every day
All of the Emails are from close friends or relatives so I open them. When I do it's obvious they're from some Canadian Pharmacy or Dr. Oz and his supplement. I have fun with them and write back a rather not nice note saying that I'll go on Facebook and ask my friends not to buy what ever they are trying to sell and to forward it to their friends until no one will want to buy the product. Obviously that wouldn't happen, but one can wish, Arecee
Unfortunately...
Unfortunately, the mere act of opening the email is often enough to trigger the embedded script which does what the evil-doer wishes. You don't have to even click on any link.
It is for that reason I turn off "preview" in my mail reader, because just doing a "preview" requires your mail to be opened, so that the badness happens before you even know it! I look at the sender and subject for every email and make a decision based on what I find. If the sender is known to me and the subject looks agreeable, I open it. Otherwise I do a "View Source" and based on what I find (links and stuff) I'll usually tip it into the Junk bucket.
I also read all emails as "plain text" so that any scripts will be disabled [*]. Often the "plain text" and the "HTML text" versions of an email will be completely different. If the body consists of links to odd random places that will go in the Junk bucket too.
My Junk system learns from what I dump in there so it will usually filter out future mails with similar characteristics. Very occasionally I'll find something in the Junk bucket that is bona fide; I can always pull that out if I need to.
Paranoid, moi? How dare you!
Penny
[*] HTML emails often contain all kinds of irrelevant crap I can do without. If you want me to view a web page, send me a link to a web page, dammit! I don't want your junk cluttering up my inbox, and it makes it very difficult to print off emails as well.
I'm sending Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam and Spam!
Sorry about that, Everybody! I don't know what happened.
I didn't do anything out of the ordinary on my computer recently or visit any
dodgy sites that I can think of. Woke up this a.m. to find I had to change my password
and saw 17 Daemon Mailer Failure Notice thingies in my mail, I guess from the old mailing
addresses still in my digital rolodex that the demon sent the advertisement to.
I never saw what the ad was for. I'm just glad that was all "I"
sent y'all and not some terrorist screed or insect porn
or the launch activation code for SKYNET...
~shrugs, hugs, Veronica
I'm now seeing why I even need a Yahoo password, which I always thought was silly.
It's not for the security of my rather unexciting files and emails or because someone
might try to clean out the $17 in my bank account but to keep out the nasty spambugs.
What borders on stupidity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
I wondered about
the nice advert for wine tasting. I'll have the spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans authentic email and spam.... I love it!
Love, Andrea Lena
Spam
It's been ages since I got a decent 419 (you know the sort: disgraced Nigerian businessman needs your help in transferring his ill-gotten gains out of the country) or phishing attempt (someone purporting to be a random bank asking me to visit a lookalike site that appears to be sitting in a remote location on the filesystem of an otherwise legitimate domain).
Now my home account gets plagued by ads for a casual sex dating site (the girls either want a threesome or are claiming their husband's away and are feeling sexually frustrated) - mercifully despite coming from a plethora of domains they're easy to filter as they conveniently all include the postal address for a Customer Relations department in Costa Rica; while my work account finds the spam folder filling up with ads for an online casino (strangely, these have only occured since we outsourced most of our email to Google (apart from GCSX, which still uses Notes as Google isn't authorised to send Restricted information out of WCC)...)
Both GMail (at work) and Thunderbird (at home) block externally hosted information referenced in emails from loading (unless you manually override them or add the address to your Contacts), while as I run Linux at home, any scripts that did try to run wouldn't be able to find the expected locations of stuff (and would probably find themselves sandboxed to boot).
Finally, my home phone gets plagued by telemarketing robocalls - PPI refunds, ambulance chasers (aka personal injury compensation lawyers) or even people flogging IVAs (Individual Voluntary Agreements - a government scheme that's almost but not quite bankruptcy for those owning £15,000 or more) - needless to say, I'm ineligble for all three schemes, but as they're all picked up by my answerphone, they know my phone line's live. They also like to change their number about twice a week thus making them virtually impossible to block (without a £100 gadget that pre-screens your calls).
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!