Tis the season for email scams and hacks and trojans. As the holidays go into full swing, you suddenly find that “You Are A Winner!” or “Reset your password here” or the most evil of all “Someone changed your password — login to confirm or reset.”

This last works not just with email but with Facebook and other services as well. It may arrive via txt, FB message but usually via email. Bill Hayes writes somewhat forgivingly of his experience with the human engineered phishing of his friends by his compromised Gmail account in today’s New York Times, “Thank You for Hacking Me”

Not to take the fun out of the story, but one upside is that Hayes lost 9,187 items from his Gmail inbox. Clearly he needs better email management — and #noemail.

Last month a friend of mine had her Facebook account cloned. The new account immediately began friending all of the real person’s friends. As soon as you were friended, the phishing began.

I returned the friend request to see what was up. Soon I got a “Hello Message” then I decided to have fun:

[fake friend] Hello

[me] hello [friend’s name]. Maybe you can help me
I think I left a wallet at your house [I have never been to her house]

[ff] I will check it out and get back to you

[me] maybe under the coffee table

[ff] Ok

[me] near the red chair
It has some very important papers in it
on the subject we were talking about

[ff] Ok

[me] I can’t say much about that here obviously
But there is a lot at stake

[ff] Ok

[me] be very casual while you are looking

[ff] ok

[me] this is very important. you know the chair i’m talking about?
[Chat Conversation End]

Of course I reported the false account just after. And it was soon gone.