More nuisance from Quepasa: advice to delete its ‘invitations’
If you get an invitation seemingly from a friend or contact to join ‘Quepasa’, please take no action on it of any kind except to delete it. I’m sorry to say that the wretched nuisances at Quepasa have once again sent out a fresh crop of fake “invitations” purporting falsely to have been sent by me . I did of course change my email password when this happened before (please see https://barder.com/3171) but there’s no way to prevent Quepasa using the email addresses which they copied and evidently stored from my email account a few days ago as often as they like. It seems that this odious practice is probably not technically spam (because those who have been tricked into authorising Quepasa to send invitations to their friends have formally given their permission) and it probably doesn’t break any laws. The only thing you can do if you receive one (or more) of these fake invitations is simply and promptly to delete them.
A few people who received what appeared to be invitations from me to join me on Quepasa understandably accepted the ‘invitation’ and authorised Quepasa to inform their other contacts. In some cases Quepasa has been able to access these persons’ address books and I am now receiving identical fake invitations pretending to have come from them. If you start to receive messages from Quepasa indicating that anyone has accepted your invitation, the first thing to do is to change your email password. But unfortunately that won’t stop Quepasa continuing to use the data that they have already got from your address book and emails. All you can do is to delete all these Quepasa messages and take no other action on them.
For further information on this tiresome business, please see https://barder.com/3171. Quepasa is a mainly Hispanic dating agency which makes a bigger profit from selling advertisements on its websites the more ‘members’ it can claim to have recruited. Hence these fraudulent ‘invitations’. Even if only a minority of these are accepted, it swells the nominal number of members that Quepasa can claim to have on its books.
As I’m once again receiving a great many of these ‘invitations’ and messages from friends and contacts notifying me that they too have received one or more of them, I can’t reply to each one individually, so please don’t think it necessary to let me know about them. If it’s to do with Quepasa, just delete it! (Unless of course you want to use Quepasa to meet a Hispanic boy-friend or girl-friend.)
Brian
Brian, when you encountered this problem, I set up an account at Que#%$! to experiment with. I have now just gone through the deliberately overcomplicated process of “deactivating” it – they don’t supply the option of actually deleting accounts. If nothing bad happens, it should be safe for you to “deactivate” yours. I’ll keep you informed.
Other readers – I’ve also tried unsubscribing from the incoming messages by using the “To prevent from getting anymore email notifications from your friends on Quepasa.com, click here” link. Nothing bad has happened yet. I’ll report back if anything does happen, or after a while if the incoming messages stop.
Brian writes: Thank you again, Clark. If Quepasa has set up an account in my name, I can’t access it, as I don’t know its password. In fact I’m a bit reluctant to expose any more surface to these confidence tricksters than I have to, and I haven’t got time to set up a special email account for the purpose.
Update: With the help of Clark’s advice and some filial ingenuity, my Quepasa account has now been deactivated, the flow of Quepasa invitations sent out apparently in my name seems to have stopped, and I have contrived also to stop the inflow to my own Inbox of Quepasa ‘invitations’ purporting to have been sent to me by others. But what a performance!
Hi Brian, I’ll reply via my GMX e-mail account.
Here’s a good article about Facebook. Their Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, was apparently running for Attorney General of California.
http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes
I found this on the site of Richard Stallman, the Free Software advocate. He is very concerned about Internet privacy:
http://www.stallman.org/
Update – so far there have been no ill effects for me since I unsubscribed to the incoming messages, nor from “deactivating” my experimental Quepasa account.
Update – I have not suffered any problems due to unsubscribing from Quepasa’s messages, nor from deactivating my Quepasa account. I now consider it safe to do both.
I too have unsubscribed and not received any further messages.
Brian writes: Thank you for this. I’m relieved that you and Clark have been able to turn off the flow of unwanted Quepasa messages. With a good deal of help from my friends (including notably Clark) I too seem to have stopped these wretched messages coming in and by deactivating my Quepasa account I hope I have also stopped the flow to others of Quepasa ‘invitations’ purporting to have been sent by me. No adverse consequences so far!
Brian, I received two such emails about a week ago. I’d received that type of rubbish before, so I guessed what had happened and simply deleted them. However, I did have a few chuckles at the thought of you pursuing nubile Latina hotties. I did think of asking you for a few pointers to improve my technique, but desisted!
Brian writes: Thank you for this, John. Alas, the considerable amount of time I have spent on Quepasa since I foolishly fell for its confidence trick has not been rewarded with any nubile Latina hotties beating a track to my door, no doubt to the relief of my wife. The most that my labours have achieved has been the deactivation of my “Quepasa account” and (I hope) an end to the flow of invitations to join Quepasa sent out in my name by a dating service which presumably maximises its revenues by claiming a membership of several million people, a good number of whom never intended to join it but don’t know how to get out of it!