I’m writing this post to share an incident that involved a friend of mine and the subsequent hi-jacking of his Hotmail account as well as his Facebook account, which indirectly involved me and everyone in his Hotmail contact list.

Earlier this week I received an email from him…let’s read:

I’m writing this with tears in my eyes,my family and I came down here to Liverpool,United Kingdom for a short vacation unfortunately we were mugged at the park of the hotel where we stayed,all cash,credit card and cell were stolen off us but luckily for us we still have our passports with us.

We’ve been to the embassy and the Police here but they’re not helping issues at all and our flight leaves in less than hours from now but having problem settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won’t let us leave until we settle the bills,I’m freaked out at the moment.wondering if you could help us with a quick loan,promise to refund it as soon as i return back home.i promise

Reading this, I was unsure if it was my friend or not. We were pretty good friends in high school, which for me was more than 10 years ago, and had since only kept in contact through Facebook. It didn’t really seem like him, but not wanting to be a jerk in case it was him, I waited to reply. I wanted to check his Facebook page for more info as I didn’t realize he’d made a trek to Liverpool. Maybe I missed something.

While I was busy checking that out, “he” messaged me. It was the same sort of stuff the email stated. He was in Liverpool and he needed money. Before I could get anything meaningful out of the convo, he signed off. I sat dumbfounded and wrote this simple reply to his email:

yo man, wtf?

The reply which told me for sure it wasn’t him:

I’m so glad you replied back,i cant call or receive right now,due to the muggers have stolen away my mobile phone and i dont have access to the hotel caling facilities due to my bills as accumulated, I have nothing left on me right now and I was lucky to have my Life and passport with me it would have been worst if they had made away with my passports.Well i need a quick favor from you, I was wondering if you can lend me $1,500USD, i will appreciate what ever you can assist me with so that i can sort the hotel bills and get a cab to the Airport. You can have it wired to my name via Western Union. I promise to pay you back as soon as I get back home. Here’s my info below

Name – ****** *************
Location – 69 Lord Street Liverpool, L2 1TL,United Kingdom

I still have my passport so I can use it as identification, e-mail me the transfer details and the confirmation number include the amount
sent. Please let me know if you heading to Western Union..

It was a scam, obviously. Every single person in his contact list received this email and I’m sure at least one person thought very hard about actually sending him money.

This raises a bigger question-how did this person gain access to his password? He admittedly used the same password for his email and Facebook, but stated that his chosen password shouldn’t have been easily guessed even by people who knew him. Perhaps he provided extremely simple answers to his security questions (which incidentally I didn’t think of until just now), or he had some sort of key logger, or perhaps, and this is my theory, he had registered on a site that wasn’t secure and his password was lifted from there.

The bottom line is that we need to be more vigilant when it comes to internet security. With more and more types of viruses, spyware, etc., coming out everyday, it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens to the rest of us.

Being a huge fan of Lifehacker.com, here are some ways you can help protect yourself. I would have outlined them all here, but I didn’t decide until writing this post that I would include the emails that got sent my way.

What are some horror stories you guys have involving a situation like this?

Note – In order to receive any kind of phone support for Hotmail, one must have an X-box Live account. This seems kind of odd, but they simply will not talk to you about a free Hotmail account over the phone. Since X-box Live is tied to Hotmail via your Windows Live ID, it might be worth signing up for one even if you don’t need one just in case you need a situation like this resolved. You do not need an X-box to sign up for this. It’s a free account, which is also used to track your achievements with Game for Windows Live for your PC. Bottom line-if you use Hotmail, sign up for this regardless if you play video games or not.

Why A Pen Name?

There are many reasons why you’d want to have a pen name. It could be that your name is dull and boring like mine. Peter Saint-Clair-totally not my real name. My real name is Chris Something-Or-Other and I chose my particular pen name because Chris competes with a a lot of other semi-famous people here on WordPress and out on the net. Peter on the other hand, is at the top of any search on Google or otherwise and I like that. It’s so unique that I don’t have any competition. I’ll explain where my name comes from at the end of this post for those of you that care .

Other reasons you may choose a pen name include but aren’t limited to:

• Disguising your gender (the Brontë sisters all wrote under male names at some point to be taken more seriously)
• To distance yourself from some or all of your writing (Lewis Carrol was mathematician Charles Dodgson’s pen name for writing fiction)
• To protect yourself from retribution (Former soldier Andy McNab used a pen name for his book about a failed SAS mission titled Bravo Two Zero)

Check out Kristen Lamb’s post on the subject to help you decide if you actually need one.

Social Media, Email and The Pen Name

If you’re like me, you have profiles on all the major social media sites (Facebook , Twitter, etc), having a separate identity on all those networks can be a real pain. I have Peter’s email going into Chris’ box and have often replied to Peter’s email with Chris. It’s confusing to your recipients and it makes you look stupid (that’s the way I felt anyway). Then you have to log in and out of your Facebook and Twitter accounts. It can get to be a real hassle.

Here are three solutions that I’ve found:

1. Create a separate profile on your computer for your pen name. For Windows users go to Control Panel->User accounts and add your pen name. For Mac users go to Apple Menu->System Preferences->Accounts.
2. Use separate browsers. Use Internet Explorer (yeah right) for one name and use Chrome for the other. However you choose to mix and match browsers is up to you.
3. Create separate profiles for one browser (my choice). For Internet Explorer, you’re pretty much screwed in this regard because IE is embedded into Windows. Use the first solution I mentioned if you must use IE. For Chrome check out this article on How-to-Geek. For Firefox check this article on Lifehacker. I chose not to explain any of this stuff here for post length reasons.

And there you have it. These are pretty solid ways, I think, to separate your online personalities so you don’t muck things up like I did.

Do you guys have any pen name horror stories? How about the ways you go about separating your online lives in addition to ways I’ve already mentioned?

And now, as promised, I’ll tell you how I came to be known as Peter Saint-Clair.

When The Da Vinci Code came out, I got pretty obsessed with wanting to know about the Priory of Scion the book mentions. Come to find out the Priory is a modern invention by Frenchman Pierre Plantard. Peter is the English-derived version of Pierre. In reference to his hoax, Plantard added the title  de Saint-Clair to the end of his name, claiming someone in his family line married a member of the House of Gisors, which is the city in Normandy where the title orginates, in the 12^th century.

If your a friend of mine on Facebook, you’ll notice that it says that I’m from Bethania, North Carolina. It’s a real city, but the real meaning lies in another part of the hoax. Villa Bethanie was the estate of Bérenger Saunière (Saunière being the first name of a character in The Da Vinci Code) who was was a priest in the French village of Rennes-le-Château.

I’ll leave it up to you to fill in all the details, but there you have it. My name’s not really Peter.