I received a couple of emails today which I almost ignored as they looked like possible spam (adware/spyware infection sites looking to get me to visit their website, or meta-spam). However, there was a chance they were genuine and they were about someone misusing my portrait from my web page on a fraud site. So, I checked the site and found that the emails were legitimate and the site isn’t. They’re using my thumbnail portrait for a fake person called Curtis Andrew. They’re downloading the image directly from my University server, including making the picture a link to the larger copy of the photo. This makes them vulnerable to a counter-attack. Once I’ve made the complaint to their service provider (it’s a Lycos-hosted service on tripod.com) I’m going to replace the files they’re using with warnings that this is a fake, while moving the files to new names on my sites, A bit of work on my part but not too much to avoid helping out fraudsters. I think using live URLs on their part was a big mistake in a number of ways. Thank goodness for stupid criminals.

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