Why January Makes me Sad

Back in the heartland (that being the great mitten), the answer to subject line is quite easy. Right now is the time of year when you realize that you haven't seen the sun since the World Series ended, the snow is not only persistent and cold, but a dirty road-slop flavored mixture that gets in your shoes everytime you go outside, and the kicker is when you realize that you're not even into February yet and you still have another 12-16 weeks of this crap before you can even think about wearing sandals again.

(quick smug plug for Colorado: Yes, it's butt cold, but most mornings i rise to clear blue skies and sunshine, and the mountains actually look prettier than usual this time of year. just sayin.)

No, the thing that immediately pops to mind this morning is the dreaded NPR pledge drive. Of course, this pops to mind due to the fact that i can't listen to the news for the entire week (or any of next week, for that matter..) because every five minutes they stop telling me about explosions on the other side of the world to ask for my money. Liz and I are already members of our local station, and we really wish they would come up with a secret secondary frequency to pass out to all of the fully paid up listeners - so that they don't lose their minds from the frequent pleas for support. (This is actually one of the few things that really gets under Liz's skin.. ask her about it sometime, and don't forget your safety goggles.)

While I'm on it, some other annoying things:

Superbowl pre-game hype.

Holy crap. I enjoy espn because they tell me about the different college basketball games i missed (sorry Sean, btw) and any trades that my Tigers have made in the offseason, but the last two weeks has basically been 24 hours of programming dedicated to replaying the same Patriot's touchdowns, Tom Brady walking though New York, and the shock of the fact that Plaxico Burress (Plax!) of the Giants actually had the gall to pick his own team to win the game. Can you believe athletes these days? (My eyes are rolling around in my head, in case you can't see me.)

Conference Calls

I'm actually currently sitting in one. Luckily, no one is sitting behind me, and i look like i'm taking notes furiously. Why, what did you learn in college?

Banking Email Scams

I got this beauty in the ol inbox last night, and it immediately caught my eye for looking slightly fishy. I did a little digging, and thought it might benefit anyone else who occasionally gets these and isn't sure what to do with them...


Above is a screen capture of the original email. The red lines and arrows are my emphasis. The first thing that should catch your eye in these things is the language and the typos. These phishing emails are going to sound incredibly urgent and mandatory, and half the time they don't even catch their own spelling errors. (see the read box above, please, i earnstly implore you)

Another telling sign are lines like the last one - "if you have not registered with Bank of America, please ignore this message and your contact information will be deleted within 7 days." This sentiment is fundamentally flawed if it was indeed from Bank of America. If you don't have an account with them, wouldn't you think that you wouldn't receive a message in the first place? In essence, this is just to calm the confusion of the folks getting this email who don't have an account, to keep them from immediately reporting it.

Notice the original domain where Gmail is aking me to download the pictures from? www.bankofamerica.co.uk. Last time i checked, bank of america doesn't bank out of the United Kingdom. Also check out the domains of any of the links in the email before you click on them. Most web browsers give you a sneak peek of where a link will take you if you hover the cursor over the link in question and look to the bottom left hand corner of the browser window. The text you see in the link on your email can be masked to look reputable, but can in fact redirect you to a website that is totally bogus.

If i copy the address tied to the link into my browser, it brings me to the following page:


Which is quite surprising to me, as it looks nothing like a real BoA page. Most of the time these pages will be decent copies of what looks like a reputable page, though, so just because a link takes you to something that looks correct, DO NOT enter in any information. (for an example of a scam that looks much better, check out this report here) Many browsers will pop up an angry message as soon as you get into it (as this page got me) warning you, but you can't simply trust microsoft or firefox to keep you safe. Once you get here, the tell is the domain - if it isn't http://www.bankofamerica.com - and only that, (no extra dot extensions, other country domains at the end, etc) close the page.

Never reply to these messages either. The best course of action is to forward these along to the FTC at spam@uce.gov - and also to the Anti-Phishing Working Group at reportphishing@antiphishing.org.

Ok, call is wrapping up, as should i. I might be taking off for Ecuador this weekend or early next week for work, and if i do, look for some neat pictures of monkeys and large trees near the Peruvian border.