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By Susan Salisbury
A frantic e-mail message that said Jupiter real estate broker Marilyn Martens
was at a London hotel with her family and had been mugged at gunpoint went
out to all her contacts.
“I write this with tears in my eyes,” the email supposedly sent by
Martens in late August began. Martens needed money to pay her hotel bill,
and the embassy and the police would not help, it said.
Martens was of course, not really in England, but was going about her business
in Jupiter. A client who had received the email phoned her and said, “I
think you have been hacked.”
“My phone was ringing off the hook with people asking, “Are you in
England?” Martens said.
“My Facebook account was hacked. They were able to get into my AOL
account,” Martens said.
Unfortunately, one client out of the several hundred who received the e-mail
wired $1,550 to the scammers through Western Union, Martens said. The money
is gone.
“People need to know this is going on,” Martens said.
When Martens went into her Facebook account and changed her password she
discovered all her email contacts’ addresses were gone, as was all her new
mail. She contacted AOL, which helped her get the addresses back, and she
now has tighter security settings.
After the man sent the money to the scammers, he received a second e-mail
thanking him that said $2,000 more was needed. At that point he realized he
had been taken.
Facebook has just published A Guide to Facebook Security, available
free on its website. Here are the top tips to protect your Facebook account:
- Only friend people you know.
- Create a strong password and use it only for Facebook.
- Don’t share your password.
- Change your password on a regular basis.
- Share your personal information only with people and companies that need it.
- Log into Facebook only once each session. If it looks like Facebook is asking
you to log in a second time, skip the links and directly type www.facebook.com
into your browser address bar.
- Use a one-time password when using someone else’s computer.
- Log out of Facebook after using someone else’s computer.
- Use secure browsing whenever possible.
- Only download applications from sites you trust.
- Keep your anti-virus software updated.
- Keep your browser and other applications up to date.
- Don’t paste script (code) in your browser address bar.
- Use browser add-ons like Web of Trust and Firefox’s NoScript to keep your
account from being hijacked.
- Beware of “goofy” posts from anyone – even friends. If it looks like
something your friend wouldn’t post, don’t click on it.
- Scammers might hack your friends’ accounts and send links from their accounts.
Beware of enticing links coming from your friends.
To file a complaint
To file a complaint about an Internet crime scheme, go to www.ic3.gov.
The Internet Crime Complaint Center is a partnership between the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, the National White Collar Crime Center and the
Bureau of Justice Assistance.
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Would you, too, like to hear what others think of you and your opinions? Then it’s your lucky day.
The Washington Post Magazine is launching a contest to find the person with the smartest, liveliest advice on navigating workplace culture. If you can advise readers on how to deal with a bothersome coworker and what to do when your boss “friends” you on Facebook, among other issues, as well as impress even Matt the Reader with your sharp sense of self-deprecating humor, deft language skills, experience in the relevant field and fierce humanity, then show us, please, by entering the @Work Advice Contest. Finalists will participate in four rounds of face-offs, with winners selected by readers and a panel of judges, including me. The winner could get a four-week column published in The Washington Post Magazine and on washingtonpost.com Just fill out the application and read the complete contest rules. The deadline for entries is Sept. 18.
Before you start, here’s some advice on giving advice:
●Find a way to incorporate into your answer your initial, gut response to the question. Chances are readers will have a similar reaction, and a nod to that will give your answer more credibility.
●Use your natural voice. Also a matter of credibility.
●Don’t just put yourself in the writer’s shoes; imagine you’re each of the other people in the writer’s story. How would you regard the writer and the situation then?
●Scan the letters carefully for signs that the writer’s judgment is clouded by self-interest. In advice columns, self-interest is Zelig, blending into the picture as if it belongs there when it usually doesn’t. When you’re through checking the letter for it, check your answer for it, too. Be tougher on your answer than you were with the question. Know, too, that you’ll still be biased sometimes, and wrong.
●Where possible, offer answers that will apply even if the writer’s description of the situation is incomplete or inaccurate, because the writers are human, i.e., notoriously incomplete and inaccurate.
●After you finish writing, go over your answers several times for angles you may have missed. If you don’t find them, readers will, and they’ll gleefully spell them all out in the Comments section (hello, Comments section!). Having thought of these other angles first won’t keep people from picking apart your advice, but you’ll feel much better about being picked apart if you don’t see any surprises in people’s criticism.
●Finally, imagine delivering your advice to the writer in person. If you’d feel rude doing that, then take the edge off your delivery. Don’t change your advice though, if you believe in it; integrity will demand that you say some unpopular things, but you’ll survive that. Your credibility as a columnist won’t survive pandering, though, or the other extreme, snark for the sake of snark.
If you think you’ve got what it takes, check out the official rules and enter the @Work Advice Contest before Sept. 18 at 11:59 p.m.
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