First of all, this last week was hectic. Not only did I try to keep up and crank out some good posts, but I also had a lot of work to do at the office. This is always the case after coming back from a trip.

So what made the week so awesome?

First, John Chow and I both posted about the contest to win our money that we got from BlogWorld. This weekend, John picked a random winner from over 120 entries. The cash goes to Adam Mlynarcik of Creadiv.com, who boosted his chances by making a post about the contest. Thanks for participating, Adam, and congrats!

I also had my own stroke of luck when I won one of the daily ShoeMoney.com t-shirt prizes in the middle of last week. I had been hoping to score a ShoeMoney shirt at BlogWorld, but didn’t, so I was pretty pleased to have won one. On top of that, there’s a monthly grand prize that I am now entered into with about 1/30 odds of winning, as I understand it. If I win, you can bet you’ll see a post about it, detailing the prize when it comes.

Finally, today I checked in on ZacJohnson.com to see who won the Super Affiliate Caption Contest. I threw in my caption because I thought it was a bit witty, but there were a lot of good ones, so I wasn’t holding my breath. I also just wanted the ZacJohnson.com/MoneyReign Package (includes “a MoneyReign.com Black T-Shirt, Bumper Stickers, Pens, Buttons and maybe something else extra”), which was part of all three top prizes, so I didn’t care that much which I won. As it turns out, I won 3rd place! Go check out the contest and all the funny captions.

I love contests, so this week has been tons of fun for me. I’m also thinking up more contests I can have, too, so stay tuned.

Image via WikipediaAs I sit here and watch banks crumble under the weight of a failing economy and bad decisions, I also continue to watch countless emails pour into my mailbox telling my that my bank’s security policy has changed or some information needs to be verified. It is with this in mind that I decided to make a post warning people of the various scams floating around. I only hope that it saves at least one person from making the mistake of falling for one of these scams.

Types of scams
Some of the more popular scams include emails that:
- Notify you of lottery winnings and request sensitive information
- Notify you of inheritance and request sensitive information
- Ask for your help moving $xx,000,000 to the United States and request sensitive information
- Notify of an ebay dispute or question, prompting you to log in
- Notify you of banking security changes, prompting you to log in

The first four try to get you to email back information to them, baiting the reader with a reward of some kind. Often, they request extreme discretion, as they don’t want you telling a friend who may, in turn advise you to do some research. The end goal is to have enough information from you to aid in identity theft, whether the scammer steals your identity or they sell your information.

The last two pose a more immediate threat. Those types of emails try to get you to log into what you think is ebay or your online banking account. Instead, you’re handing your information over to a scam artist who will then log into your account, himself, and drain it. If you ever think you handed your banking information to the wrong person, don’t be shy or too embarrassed to call your bank right away. I know better, and still fell victim once. As stupid as I felt about it, I immediately called my bank, explained that I made a mistake and needed to change my information, and they changed it before I ever lost a dime.

Why talk about this now?
There’s a lot of dumb and/or greedy millionaires and billionaires running America’s banks into the ground, having taken very risky mortgages in an unstable market. That’s how I see it, anyway, but the fact is that banks in this country are dropping like flies. If there’s one thing a smart scammer does, it’s latch seize an opportunity when it comes along. I haven’t seen any yet, but I know that somewhere out there, a scammer is writing up an email about how your bank needs you to verify your information to guarantee that your money will be FDIC insured or some similar lie. In an extremely fragile economy with real threat of your bank vanishing tomorrow, people get scared and even the smartest people make dumb mistakes out of fear. So what better time is there to remind people about the scams.

General email safety rules
It’s impossible to know every scam email out there before it circulates. There’s always a first victim. Luckily, there’s some pretty easy things to remember to help make sure you’re not one of the victims:

- If you’re going to a site you have to log into or will download anything from, ALWAYS type in the url yourself rather than clicking a link in an email
- Most reputable organizations will begin their email to you with your real name. “Dear member” is almost the same as “Dear victim”
- Never run anything in an email that you don’t trust 100%
- (phone) Never give out over the phone enough information to get a credit card unless you called the company and want a card. If someone calls and wants to verify information, make them give you most of it and verify very little. At the very least, ask if you can call them back.

I hope you gained even the smallest bit of information from this and if you did, feel free to email the URL on to someone you think could benefit.

Quick Survey
Have you ever fallen victim to any of these emails or other forms of identity theft or credit card fraud?

While trying to access Twitter, this is what millions saw today:

That, my friends, is htaccess authentication, and is often used to allow access to only a select few people to a directory or file, or in this case, a whole web site with millions of users.

What happened?
“Staging” is a development term, which refers to a final testing environment designed to be identical to the “Production” or live environment. After all changes to a site are made and tested, they are often re-tested in a staging environment and finally released into the wild. At a glance, it would appear that someone accidentally copied over the .htaccess file from staging (which protects the staging environment from prying eyes) to the production environment.

I emailed Twitter a few moments ago and will post any response here. Whatever happened, it seems to have wiped out Twitter for a few minutes, but it’s all back now.

On a side note, you can still see the message by trying to access the .htaccess file directly at http://twitter.com/.htaccess Don’t bother, though, because it’s just what’s shown above.

Update: From status.twitter.com

Users are running into a prompt for login on twitter.com. This is because of a misconfiguration error and we’re working to fix it right now

OK.. Maybe I said he could… Here’s what happened…

ShoeMoney challeneged John Chow to a contest to see who could get the most moneyfrom the Cashinator at the Market Leverage booth. The winner would get all the cash and the loser would have to throw in an additional $100 from his own pocket. In the eleventh hour, Tyler Cruz and Zac Johnson joined in and they decided that they would all jump in together and the losers would give the cash and $100 each from their own pocket to the winner to give away on his blog to a reader.

Tyler won and his prize was the unmanagable stack of cash seen above.

Yesterday, I stopped by the ML booth and was asked if I was going to jump in the Cashinator. Why not? After a short lunch, I haded back and found myself in the shower of money, trying to grab all I could. I came out with a small bundle of bills, and John was getting ready to go in, himself. He said he’d give his away on his site and I told him to throw mine in to the prize pool, too. He also decided to throw in the $28 he got from an earlier cash grab. Added to his $19 and my $20, the total is $67 and it’s easy for you to win.

How to win
Head to John’s blog post and leave a comment for an entry. If you want 5 entries, just blog about this contest and send a trackback and he’ll give you five entries. He said he will draw the winner this Saturday at Dot Com Pho.

This is pretty cool. Think Geek has announced a new shirt that features a picture of a drum set. When you tap the drum set pieces, they make the expected sounds. Watch the video. It’s pretty cool.

From ThinkGeek:

We could do what those other supposedly geeky apparel companies do, and print a regular t-shirt with a cool looking picture of a drum kit on the front because it looks fashionable. We then would tell stories about how it was trendy, make a few Rock Band references, tell you it will make you look hot and basically try to convince you to buy it. But we don’t roll like that. At ThinkGeek we know you expect innovative new products and we’re here to pony up the goods. So, how about an electronic t-shirt with both a cool picture and an actual playable drum kit on the front? That’s right. Hit the drums on this shirt with your fingers and they play through the built in speaker… simple but amazing. With 7 different drum sounds you’re ready for a personal drum solo on your chest.

Now you just have to keep your drunk from bruising you up every time you wear it.