In previous posts, I’ve written about an e-mail account that I don’t use for anything. It’s a generic e-mail account that comes with your ISP. I’m sure a lot of you have had at one time something similar. For many people, an ISP e-mail account was their first ever e-mail address they had. Of course, the online world is more sophisticated now and people mostly use dedicated e-mail services like Gmail. I can’t remember the last time I e-mailed someone and their address was an ISP account.
Well, every few months, I like to log into my ISP account to see what crap has been sent to me. It’s mostly spam but sometimes I get some interesting messages. A few weeks ago, I saw a message that wasn’t spam and that had a few attachments. The message had been forwarded to me from someone. It contained tax returns for two women. Now I could have done the right thing and just deleted the message but I didn’t. I opened up the tax returns and looked through them. Judge me if you wish but I was just curious. The returns contained a lot of personal info: full name, address, birth date, social insurance number, and of course, financial information including income. After looking at the returns, I deleted the message, attachments and all. I didn’t copy any of the information down. I couldn’t even tell you what the names of those women were.
People should be really careful about where they send information. The sender of this message could have easily avoided this problem by just double-checking the e-mail address. What if I was someone who was really morally corrupt?