My trust on trial

I can only describe the state of my mind in the last few hours as frantic with a full of anger.

I received an email from my sister and when I opened it, I saw this invitation box below asking me to be her friend (see below). I confirmed her name (Sunghee Park) and her email address. I did not twice think about it and pressed the ‘Yes’ button. At the time, I thought it was some kind of online chatting application, social network, that she wanted me to use. When I clicked the ‘Yes’ button, it asked me to input my password for Hotmail. Yes, in hindsight, that is where I should have stopped and thought about it some more. However, it was from my sister in which I had complete trust.

As I progressed through the signing up pages, I realised that it was an online dating service so I decided to stop in the middle of signing up process (so I thought). As it was from my sister, I was laughing at the thought of my sister wanting me to try an online dating service.

A few hours later, Howard sent me a message telling me that he received the invitation email from Jhoos (on behalf of me). In that flash of seconds, I realised I have been had by a com site. I googled the Jhoos and found that it infiltrates user’s email contact lists and sends out invitations. Even though I halted the process in the middle, Jhoos still sent out invitations to everyone in my contact lists. Coincidently, my sister also did not suspect the invitation because in turn she received it from her friend.

For the rest of afternoon was spent sending out emails to everyone in my contact lists to warn them of the scam and contemplating that I had fallen for a con. Even though I would not consider myself as a tech savvy nor am I an expert on online security, yet, I am aware of online scam and not to open links in emails. Despite knowing all of this, I still felt for it. I feel awful not because I trusted Jhoos invitation unconditionally but because it disguises itself and appears to have been sent by someone we trust, in my case, my sister. My trust was put on trial and it appears to be guilty as charged.