| We are please to announce that March was by far our biggest month with people visiting MotoZania. Last month we had 43,688 visitors. However with that success brings unwanted people as well. As some of you have seen in your mail boxes over the past three years letters from people asking you to contact them through their private email. Be wary, some of them are Phishers. Phishers are con artists who try to trick you into relationships and then ask for money or personal info. A recent trade article says that 68% of all people on social networks have been contacted by Phishers. Phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients. Typically, the messages appear to come from well known and trustworthy Web sites. Web sites that are frequently spoofed by phishers include PayPal, eBay, MSN, Yahoo, BestBuy, and America Online. A phishing expedition, like the fishing expedition it's named for, is a speculative venture: the phisher puts the lure hoping to fool at least a few of the prey that encounter the bait.
Phishers use a number of different social engineering and e-mail spoofing ploys to try to trick their victims. In one fairly typical case before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a 17-year-old male sent out messages purporting to be from America Online that said there had been a billing problem with recipients' AOL accounts. The perpetrator's e-mail used AOL logos and contained legitimate links. If recipients clicked on the "AOL Billing Center" link, however, they were taken to a spoofed AOL Web page that asked for personal information, including credit card numbers, personal identification numbers (PINs), social security numbers, banking numbers, and passwords. This information was used for identity theft.
The FTC warns users to be suspicious of any official-looking e-mail message that asks for updates on personal or financial information and urges recipients to go directly to the organization's Web site to find out whether the request is legitimate. If you suspect you have been phished, forward the e-mail to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
or call the FTC help line, 1-877-FTC-HELP.
On MotoZania a typical phisher email says that they saw your profile and want you to contact them through their personal email. You will notice that they do not even use your user name in the greeting. That is a first sign something is wrong. We go above and beyond to protect you from spammers and phishers. When ever anybody joins MotoZania, we manually look at their IP address and check it on several webmaster data bases for known spammers. If we see any thing that alerts us, we boot them off right away. Most spammers and phishers we catch within the first hour they are on the site. Some are more difficult. Part of the problem with controlling these types of behavior is that what they do through MotoZania and other sites is not illegal. We have talked with the FBI and Interpol about it. Since they do not ask for money through our site, we can not go after them with the law. Please help to protect each other on MotoZania. If you see ANYTHING on the site that seems wrong, simply use the FLAG button. It will alert us right away to take a look. We can not see internal email sent to you by other members. The only way we will know if something is wrong is if you let us know. We have also been pro-active in trying to protect you from phishers. Nearly all of them on MotoZania are from Senegal. We have manually blocked over 100,000 IP addresses from that country. Even legitimate people from there are being banned simply because we do not want you harassed. I appreciate you taking the time to read this section and for being pro-active in the future to help keep MotoZania spam and phisher free. | 
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