I received an email today from someone claiming to be associated with Handi-Quilter.

Please do not open the website that it has included in the body of the email.

I have contacted Handi-Quilter and they confirm that the claim is completely false. They are aware that their website has been breached as the link takes you through their site.

Please simply delete this email if you receive it.

Thanks for the heads up. We use to live off Maplewood in Oak Ridge.

This seems to be happening a lot lately! Several of my genealogy sites have also been hacked.

That's the same one I got this morning.

Thanks for the head's up.

BTW, we might be neighbors. Are you in WAQG?!

It isn't that the sites are hacked, it's that a bot has grabbed someone's name and email address off of the web - or off of an email that's been forwarded to a million people.

The address and name have been pasted into a spam email or other and sent to a billion other email addresses.

The website that they refer to actually exists, so that lends credence to the preposterous stories. People do actually fall for this, so spammers occasionally make a sale or collect a donation.

Frequently enough to be rewarding - they don't even seem to be bothered by fines or the constant inconvenience of having to change domain registrations and web hosting.

If no one ever, ever, EVVVVVVVER bought anything that was advertised to them through a spam email, spammers would stop making money and our inboxes would be ours again. :)

But until then, the crooks find it much too lucrative to give up, so we just have to deal with the deluge of stupid stuff like this. :?

The sites, themselves, are safe, so don't worry about going there. It's just the emails that are annoying and possibly contain web bugs or worse.

Thanks!

thanks for letting us know

i've heard about that email going around before. sad people don't have better things to do.

Thanks for letting us know.