www.whyville.net Nov 21, 2004 Weekly Issue



SkataHotE
Guest Writer

Trading Passwords is Bad After All

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This is SkataHotE with some information about getting scammed. I was at the Trading Post recently when I saw this girl saying, "Free Account! Free Account!" Like any other foolish Whyville citizen would do, I rushed up to her and said, "I want it! I want it!"

Big mistake.

She said, "Okay," so I went to go look at my Y-mail to see if she had sent the password to me yet. Sure enough, she had. I logged off of my screenname and got on to the other one right away.

Now, when you go to change the password of your "new" account, what you may not realize is that you can't change the parental email address. I sure wasn't thinking about that, though. I was too excited!

The next day, I tried to log on to my "new" account with its "free" clams, but the login page told me that I had the wrong password. Strange. Then I tried to log in to my old account, and THAT said I had the wrong password, too!!!

How could this be? I started to think, and it came to me that that girl had tricked me!

She had given me the password for the "new" account, and I changed it to the same password as my "old" screenname. Then she went to the login screen and clicked on "If you forgot your password, click here to get it sent to your parent's email." Since I couldn't change the parental email address on the "new" account, my password was sent to whatever parental email address she had set up.

That means she got the password I was using. She could get back the "new" account... and worse.

She then went to the login screen and got into MY "old" account, to see if it was the same. It was. So of course she changed the password my old account, and started to steal as many clams and parts as she could from me.

I had to go back to one of my old screennames and now I am using it. Sigh.

What I did was wrong. You should never take screennames from anyone or trade passwords. So if I ever get my old screen name back, which I hope I do, then I am never going to trade screen names or give anyone my password.

This is SkataHotE signing off... BEEEP!

Editor's Note: Hopefully this was all SkataHotE had to deal with. Some scammers are even smarter -- they'll take that password they've gotten from you, and try it out on your regular EMAIL accounts. If you don't think to have different passwords on everything, they can then get into your personal stuff OUTSIDE of Whyville, which can start to be really dangerous.

This is why it's important to never share passwords or take accounts, not only in Whyville but everywhere else, too.

 

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