Just thought I'd pass this warning along of a scam using Club Tread as a hide-behind name. Today I received the first scam email masquerading as a Club Tread community user. I'm hoping a moderator can do something to try to block these things.

We've all seen various scams on email, Kijiji etc. You know the ones: "King So-and-so" from Uganda wants to deposit a million dollars into your account, someone else wants you to send money yada yada.

The email came from a johnwei03@yahoo.pl and was titled "Sent from Club Tread Community by John10" with the message: It gave a link -- www.clubtread.com/sforum -- which looks familiar to all of us, but when you hover over it actually links to something completely different. DON'T click on it, of course it's phishing for your bank account information.

https://www.clubtread.com/sforum/topi...TOPIC_ID=56830

The person has been nuked already, Paul.

Yeah I just recieved this email this morning.

I got the email today, from the same spammer.

Gave me a good laugh. I don't know how retarded one needs to be to fall for this.

I received it too.

So, all our private email addresses are taken from CC and loaded to spam engines in China?

No, if you read the explanation by Longshadow, as long as you didn't reply, you're fine.

https://www.clubtread.com/sforum/topi...TOPIC_ID=56831

Oh ya! I did to and posted about it in The Lodge. Hasta la vista John Wei!

Aw damn, and I thought I was going to get rich! Guess I'll call back that Nigerian guy that contacted me yesterday.

I can't see option in my account to send mass mail to members of CC. Are you saying he did it that way? He registered for an account and sent mass mail to all of us?

I work in IT and I am having hard time to understand how he mailed to all of us?

Longshadow, basically our Chinese friend John Wayne doesn't know our addresses unless we reply to him ... But he is able to send all of us mail through Board. He is got admin rights?

He used a bot. Pretty standard. So once he has an acct on the site, they essentially simulate the entry into the form and post it. Forums all have typical URLs (each with their own) so its not that tough to create the necessary scripts. Once you're a member, you can see the member list for the purposes of sending a legitimate PM - note that is PM, not email. They will only get your email if you actually respond to the email.

Now that they have been banned, they can no longer send these messages. One thing that I did forget to do is reset the web server, if their session is still active, it may still permit. I'll do that after submitting this post.

BTW, I think you all would be amazed at how many bots and scammers try to get on to CT. I would say that probably about 30-50% of the acct requests during a given period are not legitimate.

I try to filter these out by using known email address spam databases (at a given time), IP lookups (and toast from weird countries & hosts), and profile content review. Generally this catches them all - but unfortunately in this particular case I overlooked it.

Thank you.

LongShadow, I think you do a terrific job filtering out the garbage. I've been on the site for a few years and don't remember receiving any other spam. Maybe that's why it was amusing this time, but certainly wouldn't want it to become a regular thing.