Somebody seems to be using my email address in a weird, ongoing way that doesn’t seem to be benefiting them in any way. The fact that I can’t figure out why they’re doing it concerns me, because I have to suspect that there is some benefit to them, which I just haven’t been able to figure out. I’m worried that if it’s helping them, it’s probably hurting me, even if I don’t know it.
Therefore, I’m blogging what I know, in the hope that perhaps someone else will be able to look at the facts and point out something I missed about why this is going on.
I try to make a habit of giving out “tagged” email addresses to web sites when I sign up for accounts / mailing lists / whatever. For example, when creating an account at widgets.com, instead of just signing up as “jik@kamens.us”, I might sign up as “jik+widgets@kamens.us”. It ends up in the same mailbox regardless, and it gives me some visibility into who is sharing or selling or allowing my email address to be stolen.
About six months ago, I started getting spam from an email address that I had only used in one place: signing up one of my kids for a Scholastic, Inc. book club through their web site back in 2007.
I contacted Scholastic and told them that either they were selling my email address and it needed to stop, or they had suffered a data breach of at least customer email addresses, if not more.
In response, Scholastic’s CISO informed me that Scholastic doesn’t sell email addresses to third parties; their children’s book club business was sold to Sandvik Publishing in 2008; the email address in question was no longer in Scholastic’s database; and I should contact Sandvik if I wished to pursue the matter further.
I sent a reply to the CISO which read as follows:
I don’t recall ever being asked whether I considered it OK for Scholastic to sell my PII to another company. This is especially disturbing since at that point I was no longer a customer of Scholastic’s for the business that was sold.
Granted, your privacy policy gives you the legal right to sell any information you collect to anyone you want. The fact that you are legally permitted to do that doesn’t make it right.
Your privacy policy also says, “Scholastic ensures that all personally and non-personally identifiable information that it receives via the Internet is secure against unauthorized access.” Alas, you apparently do not consider it your responsibility to ensure that the third parties to whom you sell PII keep it as secure as you claim to do yourselves. That is rather disappointing.
I will contact [Sandvik] as you have suggested. However, if I were in your shoes, I would be extremely concerned that a third party to whom Scholastic had sold PII allowed it to be compromised, and I would consider it my responsibility to investigate the issue myself, rather than leaving the wronged (former) Scholastic customer entirely on his own.
A phishing message in my spam folder caught my eye today, so I decided to take a closer look at it.
It claimed to be from CapitalOne. It had a legitimate sender address, a legitimate Subject line (“Please Call Us Regarding Recent Restrictions”), and convincing-looking content that was mostly lifted straight from a real CapitalOne email message. Most importantly, all of the links in the message were legitimate links pointing at capitalone.com URLs.
The only text in the message that was not boilerplate was this:
Please Call Us Regarding Recent Resctriction [sic]
This is not a promotional e-mail. Please call us immediately at (866) 496-5027 regarding recent activity on your Capital One Card. We’re available 24/7 to take your call.
Please disregard this e-mail if you’ve already call us since the date this e-mail was sent.
We appreciate your prompt attention to this matter.
Thank you
Capital One Card Fraud Prevention Security Department
Here’s what makes this phishing message different from others I’ve seen: the “hook” is the phone number, not the links in the email body.
Here’s what you hear, recited in a female computer-synthesized voice, when you call the number shown above:
Welcome to the the card activation center. Please remember that we will never ask for your personal information such as your social security number, passwords, card numbers, etc. via email. Please enter your card number followed by the pound key.
[doesn't matter what you enter here]
Please enter your personal identification number associated with this card followed by the pound key.
Please enter your four-digit expiration number [sic] (months year) followed by the pound key.
Please hold while your card is activated.
The card number, personal identification number or expiration date doesn’t match with our records.
[starts over]
Obviously, whoever set up this toll-free number is collecting card numbers, expiration dates and PINs, which they will then either sell or use to obtain cash advances from ATMs.
I wish there were somewhere I could report this scam to get the toll-free number taken down, but I honestly have no idea who would be interested in doing something about this and able to act quickly.
Somebody seems to be using my email address in a weird, ongoing way that doesn’t seem to be benefiting them in any way. The fact that I can’t figure out why they’re doing it concerns me, because I have to suspect that there is some benefit to them, which I just haven’t been able to figure out. I’m worried that if it’s helping them, it’s probably hurting me, even if I don’t know it.![[Digg]](http://blog.kamens.us/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
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