Stay far away from WAYN.com, it is a malicious spam website that pretends to be a legitimate social networking site by helping you to 'Keep track of each others whereabouts, friends and meet people around the world.', but it appears to be a malicious spam scam!!!
Today my wife received an email invitation from WAYN.com (stands for Where Are You Now), claiming that a friend of hers had added her to their 'friends' list on this so called social networking site.NOTICE: This blog is no longer currently maintained. This article has been re-posted to my new blog MileHighTechGuy here (please post any comments there): http://milehightechguy.com/wayncom-is-a-malicious-spam-scam-stay-away/
So she went to the site and signed up by creating a password. Then apparently the site brings up a pop-up that shows all of the contacts in your POP3 email account such as Yahoo or Gmail. I'm not sure how they get the address list, but the site automatically selects ALL of your email contacts (including those from work) in order to send them an email invitation to join WAYN. My wife didn't want to send invitations to all of her contacts, and allegedly the site doesn't show a clear choice for not sending them all invitations, so she simply deselected all of the contacts, deselected the 'Select All' option, then clicked on the 'X' to close the window.
The next thing you know, later that day I received an email invitation in MY email saying my wife had added me as a friend, and asking if I wanted to join, and also that I had 6 messages waiting in my WAYN inbox.
To be perfectly clear, my wife DESELECTED all of the contacts, did NOT send the invitations, and did NOT add anyone as a 'friend' in her WAYN account. This apparently malicious website allegedly took over and apparently added all of these contacts on its own, and spammed every contact from her computer it could get a hold of (over 800 contacts).
One thing is not clear, and that is how did WAYN get these contacts? My wife says that it was not really a complete list from her Yahoo account or from her Outlook, but a mish-mash of emails/contacts. (This site even sent an invitation to my son from her address book.)
What made it even worse was that by the end of the same day I had received over 13 emails from others in my wife's address book saying they had signed up to WAYN. So I can only guess that these other 13 people (only 1 day so far) had also received the fraudulent invitation saying my wife had added them as 'friends' and that she wanted to invite them to join, and that they too had filled out a profile. Doubtless to say, these people will likely have their entire contact list spammed as well.
One person that had received the invitation (that was supposedly sent from my wife) responded to the invitation via email. This enabled us to see what the invitation looked like. It clearly said that she had 'added you as a friend on WAYN', which was a misrepresentation and a lie:
"FirstName LastName has added you as a friend on WAYN."
And the site sends the email like this:
"From: FirstName LastName [mailto:invitation@whereareyounow.net]"
(FirstName LastName is the First and Last name of my wife, hidden here for protective reasons)
So the email appears to come from my wife, but in reality it is the website sending it on her behalf but disguising this.
I did a little research on the web after I received over 13 emails in one day from this site (around midnight, so it was not an exhaustive search). I found several other complaints out there about WAYN, and I found a few people defending the complaints...but I don't buy it. Especially after what I saw happen to my wife and the way the site misused her contact list.
I recommended she needs to send an apology email to all of the contacts in her Yahoo account (as a start) to warn them to NOT sign up for the WAYN website, state in the email that she did not add them as a 'friend', that this site is apparently using web trickery to maliciously crawl her contact email list and spam everyone with the intent of building their registered user list, and finally that if they really are interested in social networking that there are sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook, or even MySpace that are much better social networking sites than the SPAMMING WAYN!
The horror continues... My wife tried to opt out of the site. The only choice you have to cancel your WAYN account is to email these people and rely on them to cancel your account. Meanwhile my wife's entire address book has been compromised and WAYN has apparently spammed all 800 of them.
While she was on the wicked WAYN site for purpose of opting out and canceling her account, she noticed that it now had listed all of her work contacts from Outlook. She is now in the process of contacting her work IT department with an urgent message to see if there's any way to defend against this allegedly malicious spam scheme before it takes over her work contacts.
I've heard of viral marketing and gorilla marketing, but this site seems to be intent on malicious spam!
At this point I'm not willing to sign up for WAYN for myself to test it out (maybe I'll try it later with a fictitious email account). So I'd like to hear of other people's experiences...(please leave a comment). Since after deselecting all of her contacts my wife closed the contact list by selecting the 'X' button to close the window without continuing, maybe her incidence is isolated??
You can draw your own conclusions, but as a precaution you may want to warn your friends and co-workers to stay away from WAYN.
Jeff Kemp (Golden, CO), www.jeff-kemp.com.
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