Email Scams

Hello to everyone! If you never read any of my articles, this would be the one to read. It's about a problem that nearly everyone has encountered, and will give you useful information on how to save yourself time and money.

Over the past few months there have been several emails sent out to our customers stating that we are doing some house cleaningand you have to reply with your email address and password in order to remain a customer. The short answer here: "It's a scam", delete it.

Emails of this type have been around for a long time. So long in fact they have their own name. They are called Phishing attempts. They are emails that are typically automatically generated by a spamming computer and sent out in mass quantities. When you reply to it, the server then keeps your username and password and uses your email address to send spam.

That's right, the spam is then coming from you!

     So I'm sure you're all wondering what we are going to do about this. Well, first of all, don't ever reply to any email asking for your personal information. That will help dramatically. A good rule of thumb is that if an email is asking for personal information, it's a scam, delete it. Any legitimate company will never ask for that kind of information over email. If that company doesn't have contact information for you, they will ask that you call them.

If you do happen to reply to an email like that, trust me. We'll know about it shortly. We will start to get notifications that you are sending spam and we'll change your password immediately. We'll then attempt to contact you by phone to let you know what happened and together we'll change your password on your account to something else.

This can be a pretty serious problem. Just one person replying to one of these emails can cause hundreds more to reply to another email like that. It can lead to other problems, like adware and spyware costing the end user a great deal of money in computer repairs.

Can you help us? Absolutely; take a minute and explain to your friends and family that might not be aware of this kind of scam. Maybe you have helped your parents or grandparents get online recently and they may benefit from this information. Anyone you know that might not have the experience online needs to know about this, as it's becoming a fast spreading issue.

It really only takes a minute to say "Oh hey, by the way, if you ever get an email asking for a password, delete it".  It would save them, you and us a whole lot of time.

If you have any questions about this, or anything else, feel free to call our Customer Service at 1-800-485-5006. We are here to answer your questions.