Beware of SMS.ac!

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From time to time, I get these emails inviting me to join a service called SMS.ac. All invitations are claimed to be from people I know. When I ask my friends about these invites, they usually deny they have sent or told SMS.ac to send me any of these emails.

So what is SMS.ac you might say? SMS.ac is a service that aims to be a community for mobile phone users. Once registered, users are able to send multimedia (MMS) and text (SMS) to any mobile phone in the world, using either their mobile phones or the web.

What you might NOT know about this service might surprise you! Upon signing up to the service, they ask you to enter your hotmail password so they can grab your hotmail contacts and import them into your new account.

Here's a screenshot when signing up with SMS.ac:

I'm truly amazed! So many people have fallen and simply gave out their password away! It's stunning really! If it was for another service, would people be willing to give out personal information or even, let's say, a password to their personal banking account???

What SMS.ac does with your address book is anyone's guess. All I know is I get "spammed" with invitations on my email accounts every 2-3 months and SMS.ac can easily sell our emails to advertisers.

There are other services which pull off the same trick on users. Services like hi5.com for instance:

All I can recommend to people is to be very prudent and very careful when you have to give out information on the web. Take a step back, take a deep breath and make better judgments about these things! Do they really need this information?

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