"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

Various companies sometimes have online games/contests that offer chances to win from small to rather large prizes.

Look For The Pin

You know the kind, where you peel off a sticker to find a PIN number, or a box that you find a pin number inside or outside. Then you are instructed to go to a web site and enter that PIN with a promise of a chance to win enormous prizes.

Please Register

When you go to the web site you find you must register first and all boxes with a "*" must be filled in. All boxes will have a star.

You must give, first name, last name, street address, province, postal code, telephone number, email address, a password and your birth date to prove you are over 19.

Am I the only one that thinks this is an awful lot of information just for a 'chance' to win?

The padlock is open

On top of that, if you check the address bar, you will find no https. In other words you are entering all that personal information on an insecure web site.

Anyone could easily intercept that personal information. And I would guess it highly likely that information is not securely stored either.

That's enough information for anyone to easily pretend to be you.  Its enough information for identity theft figures to do most anything. With that much information it would be easy to find lots more about you.

Sorry Try Again

I am not saying the intent of any company or business is to cause a problem, although remember many times this info could be passed on to other partners so they may contact you with additional offers.

These days it is something to consider when you are asked to freely hand out personal tid bits on the internet under the disguise of winning a relatively large prize.

As you sometimes see stated under pictures, the prize may not be exactly as shown.

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License