Anatomy of a Scam Email

I get a few of these a year. 

Scam emails are an inevitable hazard if you do business on the Internet. 

They tend to be more subtle than your typical personal scam letters, which usually appeal to greed. "Hi, can you help me get money I'm not supposed to have. I'll give you a huge cut." OR "There's a pile of money here that you know really doesn't belong to you. But if you give me your banking information (and everything else I need to steal your identity) I'll make you rich!"

Scam letters aimed at your business tend to look like more legitimate queries. But if you look at them carefully, you can see the telltale signs that they mean trouble. 

There are a lot of hints to indicate that you're dealing with a scam email. Among them, vague references to your services and location without showing that they have ever read your website. Often the recipient's name or the name of his/her business is not even used.

Typically these scams include an offer to send you a check in excess for your fee, which you're supposed to either distribute among other vendors or refund the difference.  The scammers' goal is for you to deposit the check so they can somehow cancel it and suck the funds from your account.

This isn't just for wedding professionals. Anyone with a business could be targeted. Here's an email I received recently. Hopefully this will help you avoid a scam.

Say No to SOPA and PIPA

You may have found some of your favorite sites to be blacked out today. This could be a regular occurrence if we're not careful.

I won't pretend to be the most tech-savvy person out there, but I am greatly concerned about the move by some to legislate censorship of the Internet. Some of the senators considering SOPA and PIPA have even admitted that they simply don't understand the technology involved. Yet they may vote to pass these bills into law anyway.

This is a matter of free speech and freedom of expression. The forces behind these bills, the companies behind the money that pays for the lobbyists that are pushing these measures, are out to control what speech, and images, and music can be freely distributed on the Internet. That is not the American way.

I hope you'll take the time to tell your government that this should not stand. While they may still be under the mistaken notion that companies are people, for the moment at least, companies can not vote. Tell your senators that you don't want the Internet censored (SOPA) or changes made that could undermine the security of the Internet (PIPA). And tell them that a vote in favor of these bills will cost them your vote come election time.

I and many others like me are thrilled to live in an age where our words and art can be put out there for the world to see. Let's not turn back the clock on what is amazing progress, I believe, for everyone.

For more information, here are a couple of videos you can watch. And at the bottom of this post, an easy way to call your senator and tell him or her that you don't want SOPA and PIPA and their job is to do the will of the voters, not the lobbyists.

Watch more on Tech Crunch here. 


Click here to call your Senator and tell him or her you don't want SOPA and PIPA made law.

Another Facebook Scam??

Normally I don’t blog about the tech stuff, but this seems like the best way to get the word out en mass to my friends and social media students.

This morning I found this email in my SPAM filter. It said someone had posted a link to my Wall on Facebook. It was odd because this was for an account I had made by mistake in my early attempts to create a Fan Page—back when they made the links to starting one less obvious.

Account information and URLs obscured.

My spidey sense was tingling so I checked the Wall in question directly, rather than clicking on any of the links in the email.

Sure enough, no sign of this person’s post. I checked my settings and “Friends can post to my wall” is not enabled.  Also this account has no friends to begin with.

Friends can not post on this wall

This account has no friends

Now I would have deleted this post anyway had it been there. I don’t like SPAM but the fact that the email appears legit is cause for concern.

So my advice—if you get an email claiming to be from Facebook that doesn’t seem right don’t click the links. Go directly to your Facebook account to see what’s there.

Better safe than sorry.

Observations on Creating and Teaching an Online Course

Tonight I finished teaching the very first course I developed myself. It was an introduction to Social Media geared toward my Life-Cycle Celebrant colleagues.

First, let me say I knew it would take a fair amount of effort to develop a course from scratch. Next time, however, I will take my original estimate of the time involved and multiply it by five.

From the outside, it might have appeared no big deal, teach a group to use the tools I spend a good portion of my time fooling around on. Toss in some screen shots and we're off--but there was much more to it than that.

In the last month, I've taught myself Power Point, created three slide show presentations averaging over 60 slides each and learned to conduct a webinar. (The webinars were made successful by husband Paul, who handled the organizer duties.)


In an unexpected turn of events, I also had to re-teach myself the very subjects I was going to teach my students because the two sites I was covering (Facebook and Blogger) had undergone some very noticeable changes since I first started using them.  (Two happy side effects of that were that my other blog InclusiveCermeonies got an unscheduled revamp and this blog was created.)

Over all, I am very happy with the experience. The course took place over three Wednesdays, but it dominated my June. Who would have thought I'd be glad to have only one ceremony booked this month?  My only other priority this month was our vow renewal--which was lovely.

So, from here it's back to ceremonies. This weekend I'll be writing a vow renewal for my good friend Dana and also a wedding ceremony for another couple. Both of these ceremonies will take place over the next three weeks.

For now, it's a three-day weekend. I'll be writing those ceremonies, putting together the take-away materials for my class and maybe getting some sunshine. That will be the least busy I've been for a long while.