Fish4jobs site not keeping email details safe

makintracks

I have started to receive phishing emails that I can trace back to a sneakemail address I used to register on Fish4jobs. I don't have an Abbey account, so there is no danger of me following the silly link, but I do object to such a high profile organisation not protecting the data they hold.

I have emailed them today, but I'm not expecting much, so I was wondering whether this should really be reported and if so, to whom?

Sneakemail has helped me to trace previous offenders as well, but I have never had a satisfying response. The last time this happened, a company called Datakits was behind the spam / phishing messages and I took the time to write to them by snailmail, but only got a nonsense response.

Any help and advice would be appreciated.

RadoJo

Does Fish4Jobs pubish your e-mail address on their site so that emplyers can get in touch with you directly? If so then it might just be that the site has been scraped - the spammers have programmes which search websites for anything which could be an e-mail address and use them to send their nonsense to.

If not, then Fish4Jobs are obliged to keep a record of anyone they have given your data to, so get in touch with them and ask, if you are sure that you haven't given permission to them to pass your details on to third parties. If you are sure that they were responsible (some spammers just send mail to every permutation of name at different e-mail addresses e.g [EMAIL="MrsX@hotmail.com"]MrsX[/EMAIL] at hotmail.com; MrsX1 at Hotmail.com; MrsX2 etc etc, so even if you open a brand new account and never give the address to anyone, you will still receive spam in there at some point!).

If they confirm that they were responsible, then you can report then to the Data Commission who deal with breaches of the data protection act and have the power to impose sanctions on companies who breach the rules.

makintracks

Thank you for your reply. I am sure I have never given Fish4 permission to share my information as I only ever browsed on their site once or twice. Sneakemail addresses are not likely to be easily guessed or automatically generated and generally look something like [EMAIL="a1coknwq@sneakemail"]a1coknwq@sneakemail[/EMAIL].... all very obscure, because each address is individual to the site you register at to identify culprits.

Not unsurprisingly, I have had no response from Fish4. I will track down the data commission as I feel this needs to be reported. Thank you for your help. I can only suggest that more people use Sneakemail and report these breaches to pin down the offenders.

I used Sneakemail free for quite some time, but now pay the princely sum of around £12 per year, which I feel is only fair given the great service they provide. It was actually one of the sites suggested on BBC Radio 2's website of the day some time back and can be found at www.sneakemail.com

uktim29

makintracks wrote: »

Thank you for your reply. I am sure I have never given Fish4 permission to share my information as I only ever browsed on their site once or twice. Sneakemail addresses are not likely to be easily guessed or automatically generated and generally look something like a1coknwq@sneakemail.... all very obscure, because each address is individual to the site you register at to identify culprits.

Spam email address's are often faled. For example the email address displayed isn't the email address it's came from.