Be careful, be alert, be suspicious – Times News Online

For the past 10 days, I have been in the middle of a hellish situation.

Here’s the bottom line: I got hacked. Big time.

I wouldn’t be so upset about it if it didn’t negatively impact my wonderful readers.

A few weeks ago many got email asking if they belonged to Amazon. If they responded yes, they were told a friend needed a favor. They were asked to send the friend a gift card from Amazon.

Right off the bat it was obvious this was a scam in the making. I just ignored it.

Most of us instantly recognize it as attempted fraud.

That scam got too upsetting to ignore when I had phone calls from several of my friends asking me what sort of trouble I was in.

They had gotten an email, supposedly from me, citing financial trouble. At least three wonderful friends called me to say, “How can I help?”

I can’t imagine any circumstances when I would hit anyone up for money, or, in this case, gift cards.

I would rather eat cat food.

We quickly established I wasn’t in trouble. It was just scam.

Most of us get different scam attempts and most of them are easy to spot and ignore.

About a dozen friends and readers didn’t ignore the attempted scam because they thought it was from me. And apparently, I needed help.

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