James Mok’s Soliloquy

Awhile back, I have received an invitation to SMS.ac in my email from whom appeared to be a friend that I know. The email looked like a very personal, sincere, and legit note. However, I felt odd at the time that the sender, even though she is a friend of mine, would send such and invitation to me; so I didn’t follow the link, and I just ignored it. As it turns out, Tin has just discovered that SMS.ac is a scam.

I suspect that the invitation was an automatically generated email which must have been a bot of some sort sniffing though a client’s email system and broadcasted the invitation to every email logged in the address book.

Also, I know one of mine as well as one of M’s email addresses has been used by some strangers to broadcast viruses. I sometimes received email messages from that account of mine which I haven’t sent such email out. And a sister-in-law received a virus infected email which infected her computer from M’s account that she had never sent. These emails are not from any of our computers because the kind of viruses were caught by my Norton AV coming in, so it would have also caught it on the way out and would have notified me if they were sent from our computers. I also have Spybot installed which prevents any spyware infecting our computers, so such a bot infesting our computers is highly unlikely. Therefore, such emails would have to be sent by someone disguised as us from their own computers.

So, be careful of what email you read in your inbox. Even when the sender is someone you know well, it doesn’t guarantee the email is legit.