The first, and being the most urgent to bring to your attention, is a newly registered member on Monday, July 12th, sent out email blasts from within our system to other members. It started with "I am a beautiful young and charming girl looking for real love and protection, I have gone through your profile in this dating site..." The spammer made a fatal mistake in sending this spam to me - the MidChix webmaster - and I immediately banned the member from our system. After reviewing the member's lengthy activity log, I surmised the offender must have sent out more than just one message using our system.
This is our first known occurrence of such an event but we, the MidChix Team, know it probably will not be the last, and we may not be so lucky to immediately detect and ban such loathsome characters in the future. On a regular basis our team oversees the registrations of all new users and looks for suspicious profile information that might indicate the user is a spammer. If this is the case, the user's email may even be compared against a published database of known spammers so that we can promptly ban them and prevent them from causing anyone any concern.
We ask that you do your part in helping us put a halt to this type of online activity. If you have ever been, or are in the future a recipient of such email that is sent to you through our system, or if you notice any activity on MidChix that is suspicious in nature, we ask that you notify us immediately. You can forward me a copy of the email via webbird[at symbol]midchix.com, report it to any MidChix Team member, or click the "Report this" link that is in the blue box to the right of received message or on any page that displays the suspicious activity.
The second spam-related issue that the MidChix Team recently faced came from a message a member sent us two weeks ago asking us to delete her MidChix account because she has been bombarded with spam since the day after she registered with our website. She described the spam as coming from financial institutions asking her to verify account information.
This type of spam is more commonly called phishing, or email spoofing. The craftily-constructed email looks like it comes from a valid organization or institution and is requesting verification of sensitive account information. Needless to say, to protect your identity, you should never click through any link in an email to submit sensitive information, and organizations or institutions will never request such information from their customers in this manner, knowing the potential for consumer fraud and identity theft using such a technique.
Although her receipt of spam coincidentally began after her MidChix registration, we reassured the member it was not coming from us, because, logically speaking, how many members would we be able to retain if we spammed them or sold their email addresses to nefarious third parties? It doesn’t make good business sense for us to do something so damaging to our online reputation. With the transparent nature of the Internet, word of such unscrupulous practices would indeed spread quickly through the online social networks.
Rest assured, we strive to protect your online information entered on the MidChix website, and have privacy policies in place so our members are aware of our safeguards. And in our Privacy Policy and this privacy article we also instruct users on the best practices for implementing their own online protection.
By engaging in a collaborative effort that improves our knowledge of the best methods for enhancing online security, and which allows us to be proactive (rather than reactive), we can collectly work toward making the Internet, and MidChix.com, a safer environment for everyone.
Linda Anderson, MidChix webmaster ("Webbird")
Very well put Miss Linda! I feel quite safe here at Midchix. Thank you for your huge part in making this a safe and fun environment for all of us chix!
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