Recently, I posted a job on craigslist for a senior systems and network engineer. Although craigslist is a popular site, I have never used it and had some concerns about posting on a site that had received so much bad press. After researching, I decided to post our job and have been very happy with the response. But it’s a jungle out there and I knew to expect some scam artists to use the ad to try an attack.
Then today, I received an email from updates-craigslist: Updates!New Terms – Accept: June 29, 2011 with the following message:
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craigslist
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Dear Customer,
We need your help resolving an issue with your account. To give us time to work together on this, we’ve temporarily limited what you can do with your account until the issue is resolved.
We noticed some unusual activity .
How you can help?
You must reverify your account and take the time to accept and read our terms: log in here
It’s usually pretty easy to take care of things like this.
Ad: # 318-277-551-175
We understand it may be frustrating not to have full access to your account. We want to work with you to get your account back to normal as quickly as possible.
Thanks,
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Copyright ©2011 Inc. All rights reserved. CL #73445897433
It’s a scam and has all the characteristics (except typos) of a phishing attempt. It tries to get you to login with their fake link and get you to input your account information. Once your username/password was obtained, the phishers would take over your account and get as much information as they could about you. The can’t do much on craigslist except make some inappropriate postings under your name, but they could use the username/password to break into other accounts like Twitter, Facebook or bank accounts.
So as a reminder, don’t fall for email scams. When in doubt – don’t click, reply or forward. Use strong passwords and make sure you have a good spam filter and malware protection.
My journey has taken me many places I never imagined - from a family driving school business, to a dairy farm, to an engineering degree, to parenting two teenage girls. My first position after completing my electrical engineering degree was at Commonwealth Edison in transmission line design. After returning to Atlanta, I accepted a temporary position as a support engineer at Advanced Control Systems. It was a 3-month contract that lasted 10 years and I was promoted to department manager at ACS.. Now at LAN Systems, I still devote myself to providing support without compromise. My goal is to make LAN Systems known to all as the best IT Solutions and Service provider in the metro Atlanta area. Still committed to providing exceptional support that serves the needs of the people that use technology, I work with our engineers to improve their problem solving and interpersonal skills. In addition to my responsibilities with LAN Systems, I volunteer with several non-profits that serve the electric utility industry and introduce engineering as a career to young people.Technology is almost as awesome as people and look forward to exploring many “technology for the people” topics at AtlantaSmall.biz.
