been hacked and used to spam the mailing list with a**** HELP!**** letter
which describes the person as stuck in London due to robbery and asking for
money to purchase a ticket to get back home.
My daughter Nitai and Mother Akuti have both been victims of this scam and
in the case of Akuti, some devotee acutally sent money, via western Union,
to London,following the direction of the scammer, and that money was picked
up at the Western Union office in London by someone with false ID saying
"akuti dasi".
Hence that money was lost.
The scarry part is that it may be that these e mail addresses are being
monitored BEFORE the scam actually takes place. In the case of both Nitai
and Akuti the scam took place when they were away from home. In Nitai's
case she was in Alachua and so many of her family and friends knew
immediately that is was a scam, as she was not in London and they knew it...
Face book was buzzing with "where are you? are you ok? Should I send money?"
Fortunately there was a post, almost immediately, that said, "don't worry
I'm fine and in Alachua" my e mail was hacked.
With Akuti it was not so easy as she is not nearly as busy on e mail and
face book as my daughter AND she was visiting her mom which put her out of
communication range. She couldn't access her email and so couldn't
communicate with her e mail contacts! Unfortunately many devotees actually
could not contact her, and someone actually sent, and lost, around 500
dollars!
The scammers now have the e mail contacts of both these devotees and
it seems that, especially those on easily accessable accounts, like hotmail,
are in danger. Both Nitai and Akuti had simple passwords...so devotees
might want to make their passwords more complicated, including using some
symbols.
Your servant,
Laxmimoni dasi
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