While I was surfing this afternoon, I got an instant message from a friend in Manila, VV. Although logged into the messenger, I’ve set my status to invisible so nobody could really see that I am online. Her first message asked me if I’m online. I said yes. However, her next message had me worried. She asked for the time! If you’ve read about my previous post about being phished, the con artist also asked me for the time of day.

So when I encountered the question again today, I was wary to answer. Instead of answering, I asked her why she asked. Nothing, she replied. Uh oh, maybe VV’s account has been hacked into too. Then she said that she wanted to call her sister who lives in Sydney and wasn’t sure what the time here would be. To tell you the truth, that was suspicious too because I’m pretty sure VV would know what the time difference is and if she doesn’t she would be resourceful enough to Google for it instead of asking me. This time though, I told her the time difference, not exactly telling her the exact time. Then I asked her about her pending application to migrate to New Zealand. She replied that it’s progressing and that the NZ immigration department has requested additional documents from her. Hmm… not exactly a specific answer and so I still couldn’t tell for sure if I was really conversing with my friend.

I was still thinking up of what to ask her next when she asked me which of my email address addresses was hacked. You see, when my username and password was conned out of me several days back, I promptly informed my friends that someone else is now in possession of my email address and to ignore all communications coming from that account. Apparently, VV forgot which Yahoo account it was. I told her which one it was.

She then told me that someone is using my hacked account at that very moment and that the con artist has asked her to purchase Globe pre-paid cell phone cards and to email the codes to him. She asked the poser for a mobile phone number to send the codes to but he said there isn’t one and just to send it through the messenger. VV told me that alarm bells were ringing in her head by this time and she also noticed that “I” was becoming insistent, as if “I” wanted her to buy the mobile reload charge cards then and there. The poser is saying that I would be selling the recharge cards to other Filipinos here for a profit. VV asked him for the time and he quoted 10AM. By this time, VV has almost confirmed that it wasn’t me she was talking to. It was 1:30 in the afternoon in the Philippines and unless Earth has started spinning in the other direction, the time here in Australia should be later than that, not earlier.

My friend asked me about the phishing incident and I told her all about it. I was really tempted to redirect her to this blog to avoid having to repeat myself and just let her read about my previous entry. However, I wasn’t fully convinced that I was really talking to my friend, who knows it could still be a con artist that has gone through her email before chatting with me. If that’s the case, the poser would know a bit about me and my friend and would thus be more convincing in trying to persuade me to do something. And if it really was someone other than my friend, I wouldn’t want him/her to know more about me than he/she already did.

After narrating the phishing incident to her, she said goodbye and I did the same. It would have been nice to have chatted with her some more but I was busy with something. Besides, it’s difficult to really communicate with someone if you’re trying not to divulge too much about yourself to the other party. Sadly, the time of asking someone what time of day it is where they are has taken on a more sinister meaning and the joy of catching up with friends via instant messaging has been somewhat marred for me. Perhaps this feeling of paranoia would pass in time, but I hope I never forget the importance always being vigilant.

UPDATE: Please see this post for information on how I regained control of my compromised account.

It was five in the afternoon yesterday and I was waiting for quitting time when I received an instant message from AH, a friend here in Melbourne. I was quite distracted so when she asked what time it was, I answered with the time then asked why she’s asking. I thought she has gone overseas, thus the question with the time. I asked her where she was and she replied that she’s at home and that the clock in her PC seemed wrong. I just read her blog and her last entry was of her having health problems so I rationalized that she might be resting at home and might just have woken up from a nap so she might not know the time of day. She then gave me a link saying it’s a link to her Flickr/Yahoo photo album. I tried the link and was asked to login. I tried to but couldn’t get through. I told AH and she said “sayang” (shame) and when I asked her how she was, she replied that she might have to go off-line soon because she’s talking to someone on the phone.

I was a bit suspicious at this time and noticed that the link she sent me re-directed to Geocities. I was about to change the password to my Yahoo account when a work colleague talked to me. By the time our conversation was over, I have forgotten about changing the password to my Yahoo account and went home. It wasn’t until hubby told me during lunch today that he got a text message from AH that I remembered about the incident. Apparently, someone has hacked into her AH’s account and has scammed her niece to buy pre-paid mobile reload cards and had her niece email the codes.

Most Filipinos abroad retain a Philippine pre-paid SIM card and use this to send text messages back to friends and family in the Philippines. It may not be the easiest but it certainly is the cheapest way to keep in contact with people back home. As the credits in the pre-paid account runs low, the Filipino expat would ask someone back home to buy a reload card in the Philippines and send the code back to them so that expat could use that to add credits to the Philippine mobile account. Thus, it is not unusual request for someone overseas to ask someone in the Philippines to buy them a mobile recharge card and have the code sent. This scammer seems to know this practice and targets OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) and their family and friends.

I know it was dumb of me to fall for this kind of scam, I really should have known better. In my defense, I was distracted and this scammer conversed with me in Tagalog/Filipino, so it seemed like it was really AH that I was conversing with. I believe now that this scammer asked me for the time of day to determine my location. If I answered with the current time in the Philippines, I believe he/she would have asked me to buy him/her a pre-paid card. However, since I answered with a different time, he/she would have discovered that I’m located elsewhere and that the best thing to do is to get my Yahoo username and password and then log off as soon as possible.

A couple of hours ago, we received a forwarded email from a friend stating that another Filipino friend, WG, got victimised by the same scam. It looks like this scammer is having a field day with his victim’s friends list and address book and is milking this con as much as he/she can.

As for my Yahoo account, the scammer got to it and I have already requested Yahoo to disable it. I also had to change my email subscriptions and changed my passwords for other sites like banks and other financial institutions, particularly those that send email to that account. My only consolation is the phished account was an old one that I only use for correspondence from when I was still in the Philippines and that the scammer would have limited knowledge of my affairs through what has been contained therein.

As a warning to others, please be vigilant and beware when clicking on a link, even if it looked like it came from a friend. I told another friend today that if I asked her to answer a random question before clicking on a link she sent me that she should just humour me and answer my question. I have been burned and could be a bit paranoid now.

UPDATE: Please see my next post for more information on this incident.

Even though I have some energy to put into my artistic endeavours, I don’t seem to have any to put into blogging. Maybe I’m just tired of composing my thoughts into words. Despite my desire to talk about a lot of things that have been happening lately, I find it difficult to write about. Actually talking about stuff doesn’t seem to be much of a problem though.

So, in future posts, I’ll probably just write it in a more conversational tone and keep the word count low. Brief and simple. That’ll probably restore my drive to post often again.

Since I’m in the mood to do art stuff in my spare time these days, I wanted to spruce up my profile in DeviantArt, an online community of artists. In DA (as we call it), there is something called the DeviantID. It is simply a graphical image that goes on top of a member’s biographical information section. It can be anything but most of the time, it is a graphical version of the bio info below it.

I got bored of my old one which is just a picture of me in black and white plus my name in white text beside it. So, I decided to change it to something a little more different.

I grew up collecting G.I. Joe action figures when I was young. Apart from the actual toy, I love the cut-out file cards that came with the toy describing the action figure’s character and background. So, I thought it would be cool to use the file card idea and turn it into my DeviantID.

I’m not too happy with the text and my image in it as it is. I’ll probably change it in the future but it will do for now.

While running for the tram stop during my lunch break, I passed a tall dark Indian man in a gray business suit and horn-rimmed glasses walking in the opposite direction. He stopped and called out to me.

Maybe I knew the guy, I thought, so I stopped. After giving a better look, I decided that he was a complete stranger. But what did he want?

“You have a lucky face!” said the stranger with all smiles as he gestured his thumb vertically down across his face. Huh?! I’m a little hard of hearing so I was thinking that maybe I misheard him. Maybe I had something on my face, I thought.

“You have a lucky face!” he repeated still smiling as he did the thumb gesture across his face again as if that will help make it easier for me to understand him. I continued to look confounded.

“Do you know why?” he asked. Apparently, he mistook my silence as a sign of my interest.

At this point, I was thinking that he was either about to sell me something or preach to me about some new age belief. I wasn’t interested regardless. I pretended to look at my watch to show I him I was in a hurry and then I said to him, “Okay, why?”

I wasn’t really listening anymore and started to edge away from him. He said something like I will have three lucky somethings in my life and so on. It sounded like he was predicting my future — a good future. But, for all I know, he was actually giving me a nicely worded curse. However, I still feared that it was just an elaborate sales pitch. So I thanked him and bid him goodbye the first chance I got.

As I started to sprint up the street again to catch a tram, I looked back at the stranger. He was still smiling as he turned to continue walking down the road. It was a very odd encounter. It felt like I was in a Stephen King story and this mysterious person had just given me a fore-shadowing of things to come later.

Either way, I hope that I do have a lucky face. I could surely use all the luck I can get.

We’ve started bringing our own lunch to work again in an attempt to cut food costs. Most of our packed lunches were left-overs from the night before and it has worked out so far. However, I’ve been scouring the web for other lunch box ideas.

Since we’re avid fans of having rice for lunch, the best ones I’ve found involves Japanese bento boxes that typically features rice. My search also led me to a new craze called Laptop Lunches, which is like the west’s answer to the bento box. I love that it looks like the food tray you get on airplanes, only with all the goodies that you pack yourself. If images of me flying to a far-off place is not motivation enough for me to bring my own lunch so that I could save for our next trip, at least I would be nourished by food that I’ve prepared myself. I also found a Flickr pool of other people’s laptop lunches that are really inspiring!

Check out the links below to see what I’m raving about.

• Cooking Cute
• Bento Lunches
• Food Fare
• Bento Yum
• Lunch in a box
• Bento Challenge
• Japanese Food Recipes
• Flickr Laptop Lunches Pool

To err is human and this saying has been brought home to us by two incidents in the past few weeks. The first one involved incorrect entries in the group certificates given to us by our employers. There was an entry in one column that was reported as a separate income but was actually already included in our gross income. This meant the amount of tax withheld from our salary each pay period was not nearly enough and that we would have to pay more tax. In fact, hubby and I have almost a grand tax payable when we filed our returns last month.

The good news about this PAYG amendment is that we probably would not have to pay as much tax as originally computed. The bad news is that if we decide to go back to the tax agents for them to take care of the amendments, we would have to pay $45 each for the appointment. This would also mean more documentation and the possibility of mistakes and confusion cropping up in the future. What a hassle! However, there’s really not much we can do except do the extra work ourselves. We decided we’d just print the amendment form from the tax office’s website, fill that out, attach the necessary documents and hope that everything goes well after that.

Another instance when someone else’s mistake created more work for us involved our health care claims history. I consulted with my osteopath a fortnight ago and had my claim for insurance coverage rejected by our health care provider. Both my osteopath and I were puzzled, I’ve only had five consultations with her previously and there’s no way I’ve already reached the claims limit for the year. Aside from that, there doesn’t seem to be any other logical reason why my claim should be declined. I SMSed hubby, who coincidentally also had an osteopathy consultation earlier that day, if his claim had also been declined. He said no, his claim went through without any problems.

First thing I did when I got back from the osteopath’s office was to check our health insurance account online. It was then that I discovered that my previous consultations with my osteopath have been entered into hubby’s name. Looking at our claims record, you’d think that hubby goes to two different osteopaths twice a week, most of them even occuring within a day of each other!

I quickly composed an email requesting an amendment of our claims history and asking for the reason why my claim was declined on that day. After several email exchanges, we found out that my osteopath had been incorrectly entering ‘1′ on the HICAPS system, thinking that I am the primary policy holder. In fact, she should have entered ‘2′ to indicate that the claim should be for me, the secondary policy holder. I had to ask my osteopath for a letter stating that it was me who consulted with her all along with a list of the consultation dates and send it to our provider.

As to the question of why my claim was rejected, it didn’t have anything to do with reaching the yearly maximum claim amount allowable at all. The claim was declined because they only allow one claim per person per day. Since hubby had already claimed for that day with his own osteopathy session and because my osteopath is trying to claim under his name as usual, the request for payment was declined. I was asked by the health care insurer to fill out a claim form, send them the receipt and post it all via snailmail to have my last claim honoured.

When I checked our online records today, the request for the amendment of the claims had gone through yesterday. All fine and dandy? Well, no, there was still one incorrect entry on the adjustment they made. Now they have charged hubby’s last osteopathy session to me and have totally ignored my separate claim for that same day. Argh, why is this so difficult!?!

All this grief just because someone else wasn’t paying attention. Perhaps I should send these people a bill for lost time and productivity and then maybe they’ll be more careful next time.