Fruit Spam using Instagram-Beware of links

Fruit spam? Fruit spam. If you’ve been noticing a strange rise of fruit-related pictures in your Instagram feed today, don’t worry. Your friends haven’t become (even more) obsessed with taking pictures of their healthy meals. Well, you might want to worry a wee bit, because the pictures might be linked to a fruit-themed spam attack that’s slowly making its way around the popular photo-sharing service. It’s unclear just how said spammers are getting a hold of users’ login credentials, but the attack results in a number of pictures of fruit – of all things – being posted to a person’s Instagram account. The text accompanying the pictures also includes a Bitly hyperlink – clicked on more than 35,000 times as of this article’s writing – that takes users to a fake BBC page promoting weight-loss coffee. “Ever seen this stuff? I guess its super healthy, im giving it a try. I saw it on Dr Oz’s show! Link is in my bio #lovemyfollowers #health,” reads an example of one spammy photo’s description. To its credit, Bitly is now throwing up a giant warning message for users attempting to click through to the aforementioned link. It’s possible the fake BBC site could just […]

Email Safety tips and scams

Email Scams, Fake Email, How to check it video

Fake Email, Email Scams, Email Viruses. Every day I get some very bad and dangerous email in my inbox. I run so many websites and have about 10 business email addresses, so between all of those I get quite the variety of fraudulent email. I have been teaching about this since 1999. I am going to start documenting on this post the email I get when I see a new scam, and help others avoid getting a virus, or getting scammed. There is so much of it, I am just going to start with today’s inbox. Did you know there is a way you can look at your questionable email safely? I made a video on how to do that. Best viewed in full screen mode. Update 6/13 Fake “you have been tagged notifications” from Facebook. Beware of fake Facebook Tag notifications Be wary of fake emails claiming to be from Facebook saying that you have been tagged in a photograph [18 July 2012] If you click on the link within the email, you are not taken immediately to the real Facebook website but instead taken to a site designed to infect your computer with malware.  Within four seconds of […]

Did your web design company or person leave you hanging?

I often get new business from very frustrated website owners who have basically been abandoned by the person or company they hired to help then with their website. Sometimes their websites are half finished on a test site and the person seems to have mysteriously disappeared or stopped answering their phone.   Other larger companies who offer website design, farm out the work, and slap the site up, but give no help or direction to the poor website owner. Often the reason for this is they are not actually doing the work themselves. I recently had a client who came to me with that  very situation. Their website was up, but it had no keywords, tags, or any kind of the most basic SEO done. The client was more than willing to do it themselves, but the company insisted she needed to pay their “SEO dept”, once again most likely contracted out, or farmed out for the help. I have always cautioned clients about paying for SEO services. It is an area full of people who failed at other get rich quick schemes.  Remember a few years ago when you would get all those invites in the mail for “free […]