This week we’ve had a rash of those scams that say “Hi, we’re the WOU email management, honest! Your account iss about to be suspented. Please send us your login name and password or you will loose your account! Please believe that this email is legit even though we misspelled a bunch of words! Scary scary scary, be afraid and don’t think!”
OK, OK, they aren’t that blatantly false, but I feel sort of insulted that people believe we would send out an official notification with such poor spelling and grammar.
The weird part about it is, we’ve had people fall for these things even when our spam filter added a big fat warning!
This boggles my mind! Why could we possibly need your password in an email when we could just ask you to log in to your account? Or go to Account Lookup? HELLO, anybody home between those ears? You’re at a UNIVERSITY! That means you are supposed to THINK! If you’re a student, you probably grew up with the Internet… how the heck did you not learn about fake emails before now? Didn’t your friends in high school ever play email pranks?
OK, look. No request to email your password is legitimate. EVER! It’s that simple! Everybody you have an account with, whether it’s us, your bank, the Miley Cyrus fan club, and anybody else, knows how prevalent these scams are and doesn’t send real requests like that! Or if they do ask people to do that, they need to lose their Internet access and go sit in the corner until they learn to stop muddying the waters.
Let me repeat in different words. If an email says it is from us and asks for your password, it is not really from us! Really, you shouldn’t tell anybody your password, ever. Even if it’s your best friend standing right there in front of you so you know it’s really them, what possible legitimate use could they have for your password? They’re probably just going to mess with you, or give it to someone else for free access, or whatever. How do you know they’ll never walk away from a computer while logged in as you? Or get their wallet stolen with your password written down in it?