Optery To Reduce Your Online Footprint - A Review

Unfortunately, anytime you use a service online, especially a free service like Facebook, and also often when you buy stuff, your name and data ends up in the hands of data brokers.

The data brokers then sell your personal info to anyone, including scammers and scammers.  You then get inundated with spam and scams calls and emails.  This doth suck.

Without using a service like Optery, Incogni, Cloaked, or others, you would have to find these myriads of data brokers, fill out their removal request forms yourself, and keep an eye on them to stop them from putting your info in their system again - which they do, a lot.

I'd say nobody with a life has time for that.

Is it ridiculous and unfair that you need to pay a service to remove your personal data from data brokers before they provide it to spammers and scammers?  

Of course it is, but here we are.

I decided after looking at various services to give Optery a try.

Since signing up, the amount of spam and scam emails and calls has declined most impressively.  Spam/Scam calls have declined dramatically from one per day to almost none per month, and the amount of spam and phishing emails has declined impressively, but not stopped completely, and let's face it, it likely never will no matter what service you use. 

Anyway, I'm having a good result with Optery, with my info now removed from over 100 data brokers where it was found (yikes!) and Optery keeps at it removing the info repeatedly when the data brokers added it back in. And I get to see the status on my dashboard with them, which is rather satisfying to see where my data was and how it has been removed. 

So, I do recommend Optery as I'm having a good result with them, and they are not giving me anything for this review, and I'm fully paying them their regular price for the service. If you want to check them out to reduce your online footprint and scam and spam emails and calls, a referral link for them is right here.   

Argh. Spammers Should Die A Slow And Painful Death.

Apparently the address book for the Yahoo account I use for this blog was compromised today.

As such, if I sent you an email form this account or if we've communicated by the Yahoo email account before, you may have received an email purporting to be from me with a link in it.

Obviously, don't click on it. The big tip off is that the from: address, while having my name on it, the underlying email reply address is ashlee@newriverretreat.com.

If you did receive such an email, my apologies for the inconvenience and bother.

If you have a Yahoo account, I'd suggest checking it and probably changing the password just in case as well.

I don't think this is a hack of the account itself as it had a pretty strong and long passphrase, but just in case I changed it and added two-step verification. I suspect this is yet again another Yahoo-wide vulnerability.

Damn spammer scum.

It Must be Tax Season......

Based on the amount of IRS related spam I've been receiving lately, the scammers and spammers are out for your identifying info using the IRS as a cover.

I've now received spam with everything from the charmingly misspelled subject line of "Accaunt blocked!" to multiples with the same nonsensical subject line of "ssubfed", to emails with fake from: addresses like scam.irs.gov and scamreport.irs.gov (maybe that's what you'd call a clue to the unwary?), investigation.irs.gov, and security.irs.gov.

Folks, the IRS does not initiate communication with tax payers via email, and never in such a nonsensical and ungrammatical fashion (tax code excepted).

The IRS much prefers to send really scary-looking letters to your address of record.

Add on to this the fact that the email address receiving these emails is completely unconnected with anything I have to do with taxes and the whole thing is an easily deleted scam and spam-fest.

Do not reply to these false emails, and certainly do not respond with any personally identifying information or this tax season you'll be dealing with identity theft on top of filing your returns this year.