Two Greymouth businessmen are stunned by an email scam that sent a pleading message from the personal email account of one to the other.
Architect Gary Hopkinson was more than a little surprised to receive a begging email, supposedly from Greymouth builder and business associate Lynn Whyte, asking for cash and claiming he had been robbed while overseas.
Unlike most scam emails, which spell a name incorrectly or have the right name but wrong email address, this came from Mr Whyte's personal email account.
IT experts say they believed a virus had hacked into Mr Whyte's Hotmail account, sending pleading messages from his own email to his business associates.
The bogus message claimed Mr Whyte had been robbed overseas in Alabama, and he desperately needed help.
It started by apologising to Mr Hopkinson for not telling him about the holiday: "Please, if you can not afford the entire amount I will appreciate whatever you can afford to send to me, I promise as soon as am back I will Pay (sic) the money back to you."
It asked that the money be transferred via Western Union.
Mr Whyte said yesterday he had not been to Alabama, or been robbed.
He had now managed to get his Hotmail account frozen, although that meant business associates could still email him.
However, even getting that far proved a challenge because Hotmail administrators wanted lots of account information before they would act on the scam, he said.
"I don't know how they (hackers) did it," Mr Whyte said.
Mr Hopkinson said he had received lots of spam email before, but this one was more impressive than most.
"They've got into our computers."
ITWork owner Brent Oldham said a computer virus doing the rounds had been picking Hotmail user names and passwords, whereas generally Hotmail was one of the more secure email servers.
"The main thing is to keep your anti-virus up to date, and anti-spyware."
Mr Oldham said in other scams, people would hack into databases, extract names and make it appear emails were coming from someone you knew.
His advice?
"If you get something saying you've won money, or they want money, use your common sense and get in touch with the person."
