IMPORTANT! Have you received an email to your forum username?

competitionscafe

mikeyk wrote: »

Domain first registered in 1998 as well - so, although the content may not have been there, the site's been registered for a long time!

The Ltd company however was only incorporated in 2008:

Companies House Number: 06526363
http://www.companiesintheuk.co.uk/ltd/moneyexpert-holdings


There is also a debt management company registered at that address:
http://www.immediatefinancial.co.uk/

"Immediate Financial is a Trading Name of House & Home Care Ltd.
Registered Office: Immediate Financial, Unit 6, The Parks, Lodge Lane, Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside WA12 0JQ " 5829935

http://iva.co.uk/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5942

vetfred

Unless Derren Brown owns 'Money Expert', then I find it hard to believe they have simply managed to guess our email addresses for our MSE usernames.

Therefore I feel it's pretty important that MSE writes to users to explain the situation. After all, the use in having a thread on this site when the email is waiting to be opened in email inboxes is rather limited and one would hope that once notified of a potentially malicious email being sent to its users, MSE would actually act upon it with more directness.

Finally, it would be very good to know just how our emails have been obtained by 'Money Expert' especially since some will use unique usernames or email addresses between the various sites they are registered with.

StumpyPumpy

Hotmail spam filter picked this up for me, from others in this thread it appears gmail picks it up as well.
<---- you can see I've been here since before 2009
In the interests of experimentation (don't try this at home, kiddies) I let it try and infect me. On a standard, fully patched and up-to-date Vista installation with Microsoft Security Essentials installed the threat was immediately picked up and eliminated, it wouldn't let me extract the zip to begin with, after disabling that it wouldn't let me run the exe. The same happened on Windows 7. I don't have appropriately configured VPCs to hand to test any other configurations.
There is no new moral to this story, just the old one, at least as far as these two configurations are concerned: Make sure your computers are fully patched, Windows Update is turned on and spam filters enabled.

SP

Rudyson

I've received one today as well
Haven't logged on here for over a year I think

eyeopener2

I received this twice this morning to my work email address.

marmitemayhem

Same here. Unique email address only used on this forum.
Either Martin has been making money selling our addresses, its been hacked, or an ex-employee (or soon to be ex!) has stolen the database....

meggsy

Yes - one email received 15.35 p.m.

Smiley82

Also received - will be interesting to hear the outcome on this one.......

MyRubyRed

Ive been a MSE member since 2007 but haven't received anything untoward??

PhylPho

meher wrote: »

Promise, I'm not imagining things. This really happened. I narrowly escaped that one; mainly because it wasn't compelling enough for me. And sure if there are sister sites or sites claiming it has Martin's support and it's for moneysavingexpert forum members', I'd use my username and same email id to join - wouldn't you?

Thanks meher, I'm not doubting your experience. But in answer to your question though, first thing I'd be asking is, why is Martin seeking to dilute the value of his website as a major online reference resource?

Next thing I'd want to know is, how come neither he nor anyone else at MSE has announced this in advance?

Without a ready answer to one or both of those questions, I'd keep well clear.

And even if the other website turned out to be authentic, using the MSE ID and email addy would be an absolute no-no: no website can ever be 100% secure, 100% of the time, so to mitigate that risk it's absolutely essential to ensure that who you are in one place on the Internet is not who you are in another.