Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Check out this Phishing Scheme

I received this message today through Flickr and thought it was hilarious. There were lots of links to click on to "approve or reject" their request, so of course, I didn't click on anything. Here's the first part of the message:

"We at NowPublic are working on coverage of the top 10 worst fashion trends of 2008, and we are putting together a collection of photos. We came across your amazing photo on Flickr and it would be a great addition to our story. We would very much appreciate its use, with proper credit to you of course."

The funny part is that is says they are working on coverage of the top 10 WORST fashion trends of 2008. Now why would any sane person want to have their photo included in the WORST fashion trends. And I don't even know to which photo they are referring ???!!!

2 comments:

Terri said...

This was not a phishing scheme - NowPublic is a participatory news network that relies on people like you to contribute photographs or video to help "crowd-power" our stories. The form which you received was designed to make the process as easy as possible for you.

As for the subject of the story, worst fashion trends of 2008, apologies if you took offense to that - that's obviously no reflection of your photography skills, but for whatever reason the subject matter in at least one of your photographs was deemed relevant to the story by someone.

Best,
Terri Potratz

retrothreads said...

I appreciate the additional info, but the reason I assumed it was a scam was the message failed to indicate which photo they were interested in. I didn't care for the form letter approach and was skeptical of the prominent links to an unknown (to me) site.