Yesterday I received an e-mail from one of the people in the Neighborhood asking if I had an Amazon Account. I responded that I did not have one but asked what she needed.  I was surprised by the answering request because I really did not know the person who sent the e-mail.  This is what I received:

I am sorry for bothering you with this mail, I need to get an Amazon gift card for my Niece, Its her birthday but i can’t do this now because I’m currently traveling and i tried purchasing online but unfortunately no luck with that. Can you get it from any store around you? I’ll pay back as soon as i am back. Kindly let me know if you can handle this.

 Await your soonest response.

Thanks,

The request did not ring true for several reasons. To name a few: (1) I did not know the person well enough for them to have made such a request. (2) The supposed inability to purchase a gift card online was suspicious. (3) The wording of the request was strange. (4) Why didn’t the person write a family member with this request?

Finally, I did something I should have done before I answered the e-mail.  I looked at the e-mail address, then went to the Neighborhood Directory and compared the e-Mail address of the sender with the e-mail address for the person in our Directory.  The results were enlightening.  The person who sent me the e-mail had an address like this xxxxxx1@comcast.net, while the person in our Directory had almost the same address of xxxxxx@comcast.net .  That 1 in the e-mail address made quite a difference.

I sent an e-mail to the man and wife whose e-mails were in the Neighborhood Directory and this is what I received back:

My email has been hacked.  Sorry.

I asked permission to write a Blog Post about this incident and got this reply:

Yes, that seems to be the second email that was sent if someone responded.  Do write it on the Blog Post.  They also wiped my address book clean.  I’ve lost all my email addresses so that should be fun to reconstruct.  I was also unable to change my email password on the main computer, so finally go it done on my laptop.  It has been a messed up afternoon and evening, not to mention what it has done to my friends and acquaintances.

This seems to be a variation on the old scam where a supposed family member or friend contacts you saying they broke down and need money for car repair or whatever.  The Bad Guys also destroyed her address book, making it difficult for her to warn people once the scam was discovered.

I suspect that if I had complied and bought the Gift Card I would have probably been asked to send the card number to the supposed “Niece”, and I would have been out the money I had spent to purchase the Gift Card.

If you get an unusual request by e-mail, first do what I should have done immediately, Call or e-mail (using a known good e-mail) the supposed sender and check whether they sent the message.  Remember – There a lot of wicked people out there who want to separate you from your money.  Take care.  Don’t be a Victim.

This is a continuation of a post I put up on 3 October 2014 (if you want to check out the original, titled “Where’s My Package?”).

Once again, we received notice that a package had been delivered, went to retrieve it, and found no package.  So, this time I checked my camera system to determine whether I had been the victim of “Porch Pirates”.  To my relief (if you want to call it that), there was no sign of a package delivery at my residense.  I checked my front door camera, my driveway cameras and  my cameras which show 138^th Ave. Ct. E. and 117^th St. E.  I saw no record of a delivery van when the package was supposed to have been delivered.  Then I surveyed the time from early morning until after we received the e-mail telling us that the package had arrived.  No sign of a delivery van that entire day.  I contacted the carrier and explained that I had received an e-mail telling me that my package had arrived, but I had cameras and knew that no delivery man entered my property.  I stated my cameras also surveyed the roadway and I could say for certain that no delivery van had been on 136^th Ave. Ct. E. on the day my package was supposed to have arrived.

I asked the carrier to contact the driver and ask him where he had dropped my package. I was told that they would “try” but I would probably have to wait until the driver finished his rounds.  They promised to call me back.   Not very satisfactory, especially since the followup call back never came.

Further sleuthing convinced me that the carrier was using an unmarked van and it had probably dropped my package off at a neighbors.  Their house number is the same as mine, just one street over from mine.  A quick call elicited the information that my neighbor had just arrived home and found my package at her front door. Soon thanks to her husband, who brought the package over, I was actually in receipt of my package.

I was able to track down my package because I had access to my cameras and Neighborhood snapshots in our neighborhood repository.  In this case it probably only saved me about 5 minutes because when I called the neighbors my package had just been discovered.  Thank goodness for good neighbors.

It’s nice to have cameras.  If someone had stolen the package from my front door, I would have had a pictorial record of them, from several cameras, all time stamped and evidence  to show police. The pictures would have been far better than you can get from the 1080P that even the better doorbell cameras have.

Before I started this post, I contacted Dav Eide, and he told me that he too had a missing package recently.  Dav knew it had never arrived because he also has a camera system.  In his case, the vendor shipped a replacement which was lost, probably by delivery to the wrong address.

I saw this today (23 Feb 2020).  Score ONE for the good guys.  The headline actually read : “Soldier in Iraq captures crooks burglarizing his Illinois home with doorbell camera app”.  Just shows you the weird way  the media uses the English language, because obviously the crooks were not using a doorbell camera app to burglarize the soldier’s home, but were rather caught on the doorbell camera during the burglary.  A report can be found at : https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/soldier-in-iraq-captures-crooks-burglarizing-illinois-home-with-doorbell-camera-app/ar-BB10izZI

From the video attached to the report it appears that either the soldier has multiple doorbell cameras or several other cameras by a company which started by manufacturing doorbell cameras.  The main point is that security cameras do work.  Not all the time, but often enough they provide valuable information through which police are able to solve the crime.

There are now several “doorbell cameras” being offered for sale.  The most of them have a resolution of 720P with a few having a resolution limit of 1080P, which is fine for close up work (as in viewing a person standing still in front of the camera).  When those people are on the move, or further away, things tend to get blurry. For better security you need additional cameras. Today the standard for security cameras is 4K and anything less than 4MB  or 5MB should not be considered, with one exception.  I have several WYZE cameras for inside surveillance.  They are only 1080P but have several advantages like sound activation as well as motion detection, are relatively inexpensive, offer free 14 day storage  for life, and will send messages to your smart phone. With these cameras if someone breaks into your home and steals or destroys your cameras, your images are stored off site and can be recovered anytime within 14 days.