Computer pirates target local man

Author: Frank Matys

Date: Dec 17, 2009

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Frank Matys

Someone hijacked Jerry Wink’s personal email account over the weekend and sent a message to everyone on his contact list asking for a loan of more than $3,000.

ORILLIA - Jerry Wink was scrolling through his emails on Sunday morning when, without warning, “everything disappeared.”
Before his eyes the computer’s inbox and trash had been emptied in a flash.
“About three minutes later, I received a call from Florida,” says Wink, a former city councillor.
It would be the first of many calls from concerned friends.
As Wink soon learned, everyone on his contact list – close to 400 people – simultaneously received a suspicious looking message bearing his email address.
Topped with the urgent heading, “I need your swift response,” the email claimed Wink had lost his wallet while visiting the U.K. and needed more than $3,000 to settle his hotel bill and pay for a flight home.
The anonymous author, posing as Wink, asked for a loan and encouraged potential donors to “please try and make it confidential.”
Through the confusion and frustration that followed, one thing became abundantly clear: someone had hijacked his email account.
“The big dilemma is, how do I stop it?” he said during an interview at his home the following day. “How do I get out of it?”
Equally troubling was the knowledge that someone may now have access to the wealth of personal information stored on his computer.
Banking data, credit card numbers, passwords – the list goes on.
“As long as I haven’t lost anything, you can deal with it,” he added. “The thing that worries you is, is this the beginning of an identity theft problem?”
Many are asking the same question.
Police across Canada are reporting a sharp spike in fraud crimes by individuals posing as friends or family members who claim to be in urgent need of money, often citing an emergency as the reason.
The use of a hijacked email account increases the threat due to the trust level that exists between the sender and recipient, police have said.
On Monday, Wink had yet to receive a single email following his ordeal, suggesting that his problems are not over.
He has since changed his password and planned to have his computer debugged, adding that a new email account may be necessary.
“It is frustrating,” he said. “You don’t know what to do.”