Thieves are stealing myspace profiles left and right so they can spam other people. In some cases, they steal more than just your profile.


HERE'S HOW:

They post a message, bulletin, or comment containing a Flash file. It might be disguised as a game, or lately there's one that says, "Click here if you like to smoke pot." But in reality, it's just a trap to steal your MySpace.

Without you realizing it, the Flash file automatically redirects you to a different website where the thief has set up a copycat of the MySpace login page. What it looks like to you is, "Oh, stupid MySpace logged me out again." And so you enter your username and password, and bingo -- they just stole your profile. Since you were on a copycat site, it didn't log you in. It just stored the email and password you entered in a big file and now that profile thief is going to use your account to spam people.

But the danger doesn't end there. The person who stole your profile knows that you can always change your password and lock them out of your account. So now, they try to take over your profile entirely. If they see your address ends in yahoo.com or hotmail.com, they go to your e-mail login page and try to log in to your email account with the same password. Many people use the same password for their e-mail account and their MySpace profile, and if you're one of those people, now the thief has access to your e-mail, too.

Check this out - once they have access to your e-mail, they can start sending lost password requests to PayPal, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, eBay, or anywhere else you might have an account and they can now reset your passwords on other systems and even change the address on your MySpace profile to their own So you can never log in again!

Don't be fooled into thinking MySpace will let you back in to your profile once its stolen and you can no longer log in.

If this happens, MySpace will ask you to send a digital picture of yourself so they can see if you are pictured in the account that you say was stolen. If the spammer has deleted all of the face pics in your profile (which they usually do), then MySpace won't do anything at all because you have no way to prove the profile is really yours.

But if they see your picture in the account you say was stolen, MySpace still won't give you access to the account -- they'll just DELETE IT. And now the spammer can't use it anymore, but you will have lost all of your messages, photos, and comments and you'll have to start all over again.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM THIEVES:

1. Change your myspace password right now. Even if you haven't seen weird bulletins yet, your account info may have been stolen and the thief hasn't used it yet. They steal thousands at a time. Yours could be sitting in a spammer's list just waiting to be hijacked.

2. Change the password to your email address right now. It's no good just changing your MySpace password, because if they can get into your email account, they can still steal your profile.

3. IMPORTANT: Make sure your new e-mail password and new MySpace password aren't the same!

4. Never click on a link in a bulletin, message, or comment that looks suspicious. It's probably a trap to steal your profile.

5. If it EVER looks like MySpace has logged you out, don't enter your email and password. Instead, type 'www.myspace.com' in the address bar and hit enter to make sure you are still on the real MySpace website and not a copycat site.

6. If you see weird bulletins showing up from your friends, message them right away to tell them their profile has been stolen and advise them to change BOTH their MySpace password and their email account's password. Most people don't see the bulletins their account is posting until it's too late.

7. Re-post this bulletin and PASTE the whole message into a new bulletin.

bulletins that you didn't post?

are you finding bulletins in your list that you didn't post? maybe comments sent to your friends that you didn't post?

you can stop this by changing your password! a spammer has access to your account. they're using it to market their junk to your friends via YOUR bulletins and YOUR comments. fight back by changing your password!!

now how did they get your password? it's called phishing. somewhere on myspace you clicked on a link, profile, page - something, and you saw the myspace login page. but wait - it wasn't really the myspace login page. it was a FAKE LOGIN PAGE.  that fake page was created by a spammer who is waiting for you to enter your email and password. once you've done that, he's stores your info. then he runs scripts to send bulletin spam and comment spam on myspace.

so don't fall for the trap - check the address bar at the top of the page and make sure you never login unless you're on "myspace.com". to be totally safe, type 'myspace.com' everytime you see the login page. if you type in myspace.com, you'll know you're on the right login page.

p.s. if you see a friend posting junk on their bulletins, send them a link to my blog so they know what's up !

look at these screen shots for examples. in these two cases, the spammer used a myspace profile (so the link still says myspace), but its not the login.myspace page - its a profile page with code in it made to look like a login page.

example 1
example 2
example 3  

you may be looking at these and thinking how can i ever tell the differnece btween the real login.myspace.com page and one of these fakes? its a subtle difference! answer: NEVER login on this page. if you are logged out of myspace, just type www.myspace.com yourself, and then you'll know the login page is real!!

Just to let you know if you go to Toms blog you will find the above message.

Im just warning all my friends too as a friend helped me out when it happened to me, so if I can be a good friend back Im just passing back the good karma.

Bless,

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