False & Scam Emails

[Paolo]

One thing that may have happened from the recent hack of EA was the heisting of registration email addresses.

I can't confirm this, however, I have received scam email from, for example "EAuserName @ yahoo . com"

The one this morning was from CvanD. I won't say what his email really is, but I KNOW it isn't from yahoo, and I know he knows better than to try and go to the Philippines right now!

The email is a typical "reply to this, so we can exchange information so that you can send me $$$ through Western Union."

So, if you get an email from an Archive contact, please verify it BEFORE you reply to it!

If you KNOW that your friend uses hotmail, for instance, send them an email to that one, and not using the REPLY button!

For instance, if you get one from "Paolo" that is NOT from eunuch.org server, and is from, say, yahoo, it's fake!

I would say that most of the time, your contacts are going to let you know that they are changing addresses.

[colin (imported)]

Paolo,

Thanks for your sound advice. I find it hard to believe how many people are taken in by these scams.

Personally, I never reply to an e-mail using an embedded url unless I am 100% sure. I regularly get mail apparently from banks and other organisations saying my account has been suspended and use the url they supply to re-instate it. Most of them are organisations I have never dealt with and some are ones I have not even heard of.

If it is one of the ones I do deal with then I use my normal login procedure to check the status of my account.

Occasionally, one is genuine but that is less than 1 in 1000, and the genuine one can be sorted out by direct contact.

I get an automatic tax rebate every year from Revenue & Customs (in the U.S. read IRS) but this is always via snail mail. But, I still get e-mails apparently from them saying that there is a refund but I have to login in order to get it.

So, I will re-inforce your message: Take care and don't be greedy. If an e-mail promises money or a refund and you respond to it then you deserve to get fleeced.

[janekane (imported)]

Perhaps I am alone in this world of human toil and tribulation, if there is such a world and I am in it.

I take it as a foundational existential premise that no one, regardless of circumstances or other situational, or supposedly dispositional, factors, can ever "deserve to get fleeced."

The "bioengineering-based research" which I have done. and continue doing, regarding public safety aspects of the structure(s) of human society calls my attention to a particular gaggle of research findings. Among these findings is a very nearly lifelong observation that is central to my personal encounter with what is purportedly "The Social Construction of Reality," that being the title of a 1966 book by sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The subtitle of that book is, "A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge."

In my work, I find the search for an accurate, testable, refutable-if-false, treatise on the biology of knowledge to be a greater challenge than the sociology of knowledge, and a treatise that may portend of authentic understanding of human knowledge and understanding that has no complete precedent in the history of humanity.

When, at an age of less than one year after I was born, I observed children somewhat older than me being told, in various ways, that having been told something in words was effectively the same as understanding what the children were told, it was blatantly obvious to me that understanding anything merely through having been told of it via words was a forever-absolute-impossibility. I have never, never ever, not so much as once, believed that any mistake, accident or other event which actually happened, having actually happened, could actually have happened other than as it happened.

The belief that people actually make actually-avoidable mistakes, which I find contiguous with the belief that actually-avoidable accidents ever actually happen, is, for me, an aspect of the social construction of reality which I find inextricably maps onto the realm of apparently socially-mandated delusions, if a delusion is a firmly held belief that is contrary to directly-observable objectively-verifiable tangible existential reality.

In my work, the infant-child transition of, typically, about 18 months of age, is an event that is so devastatingly traumatic (in the sense of trauma as neurological injury that commonly manifests itself as socialization-induced moral injury) as to render a vast majority of people who get through the infant-child transition in the manner that, by my research data on about 3000 people, suggests incapable of consciously remembering the simple and direct honesty of newborn human infants. The way in which I am autistic and my total life experience together have effectively ruled out my ever going through the infant-child transition.

I have never believed that anything that ever actually happened, had it actually happened differently, would have been better than what actually happened. Why so? Because what actually happens is all that actually happens, and the wondrous hypotheticals that dance the apparent dance of death in adversarial legal procedures never actually dance except as intangible hypotheticals that are never actually realized.

In my work the infant-child transition is so devastating a form of biological/neurological/moral injury as to render an apparent majority of people capable of participating in social structures in which "people who are different" are treated as "enemies."

To me, everyone is one-of-a-kind-in-forever, and so, if being different makes for being enemies, every time a person learns something new and so becomes different in self-understanding, the person becomes the person's own enemy. That, for me, in beautifully horrid ways, accounts, with magnificent atrocity, for the whole realm of human addictions.

Believing that ignorance justifies being fleeced is, for me, a tragic aspect of addiction as manifest distortion of tangibly objective reality through the psychological defense of displacement.

[colin (imported)]

I am sorry but I totally disagree with you!

There are cases when someone, in ignorance, might open a suspect e-mail, but there are others who seem to do it regardless.

At the moment, in the UK there are warnings broadcast on Radio and Television news of a World-Wide attack using spam e-mail. They appear to be from a bank, but if you click on the URL it causes a virus to take hold of your system encrypting files. Once this is done they issue a ransom demand.

So far, I have received e-mails from three banks and one from Pay-Pal. Apart from the last, I don't deal with those banks and the two I do use both have messages on their site which say that they never send an e-mail which asks you to log in to their site.

With Pay-Pal all I did was to login in the normal way.

Simple, easy precautions, but there will be many who will get caught because they are too stupid, lazy or ignorant, to exercise a little caution.