spam
How to protect your personal information from spam? FamilySearch not feeling safe with messages from unknown Raymond Oliver @ddd52 offering information on my family name and requesting to communicate by other means. I thought personal info. was protected?
Is FamilySearch aware? if so, why not sent info. about said scammer?
SCAM: "Good day, I am writing to you today with an exciting opportunity that I believe will be of great interest to you, given your unique surname.
However, due to the sensitive nature of the opportunity, I believe it would be best to communicate via email.
Kindly contact my personal Email for details: ……"
Answers
-
This is probably spam and should be reported, The possibility of obtaining your details could be through "Latest Changes" By clicking on a name it would bring your name and your email address if you have made it public, if there is no email address shown, the the spammer can send you a message through the chat system. You need to go into your account and check what you have made public,
1 -
You can report abuse/spam by going to the chat. If you click on the three dots at the bottom of the chat, a popup box will open where you can report the abuse. The information will then to those who deal with this type of thing.
1 -
@NCarolinaJ See this thread for instructions on how to report.
2 -
@NCarolinaJ - Don't worry. Your personal information is safe. All that spammer knows is your public FamilySearch user name. These would be easy to harvest from any website. I got the same message in Chat as did my wife, another user who posted about it, and probably a lot more people as well.
A common technique used by legitimate advertisers and con artists of all sorts is to make use of the fact that we are all at our core rather proud and self centered. Notice the words in the message: "given your unique surname." We all, even if we would never admit it aloud, know that we as an individual are special and unique and so we immediately jump to the automatic and instinctive conclusion that this person knows our surname, because, after all, it really is quite special and unique in our own eyes even if it is just Smith.
He does not.
3 -
As Gordon and others have said, the scammer knows only what's public on your FS profile. For most of us, that's just our user name, nothing else. He knows neither your name nor your email address. The whole point of the scam is to get those details by getting you to write to the email address in the message. It's called phishing.
Treat FS's internal messaging the same way you do text messaging: never, ever follow an unknown link or write to an unidentified email from one. Yes, it can get difficult to judge "scam or real"; it pays to pay attention to the details: is the link subtly misspelled? Has the person actually identified himself, or is he relying on assumptions? Err on the side of caution: reply to genealogical inquiries using the same medium they arrived in, at least until you're satisfied that it's a real person at the other end.
2 -
And to expand just a bit to what Julia said - DO NOT succumb to flattery! "You're unique." "You're special." "It sure was fun to sit next to you in high school English laughing at our teacher's jokes." "I can only trust you."
1 -
One more word of caution - there is an option on FamilySearch to make your personal contact information available on your profile. Don't.
1 -
@NCarolinaJ We investigated this. This is a well-known spammer that we are working to shut down. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Everyone here has given you great advice on how to deal with spammers. Thank you to our Community users. In a world full of hackers and spammers, we all need to adopt better practices to take care of our devices and protect ourselves.
0
