Iguana - 9:24 pm on Apr 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

I actually clicked on the link in a Phishing email and entered my Amazon password! What was I doing?

Under pressure at work, I saw this email apparently from Amazon.com - questioning my account with them. For some reason I wasn't thinking. In my head was the possibility that they were checking accounts that had never been used and had no credit card details. Obviously I didn't enter my Credit Card details as asked and immediately sent a email off to the Associates support mail to say "so you need a Credit Card to be an associate now do you". I had this whole elaborate scheme in my head about what Amazon were doing - such as had forgotten about people with accounts who never bought anything because they were associates from another country.

I was called "lower than a country bumkin" on the Amazon discussion board - someone defended me by saying remember what it was like when you were first online. But I was programming computers before the IBM PC was invented! My first program was for a computer that had 4K of RAM and that was a mainframe! I just wasn't thinking clearly.

The rather well-done pages were on a legit US site selling stuff. I contacted the host company who immediately removed them. They identified the rogue IP and I geolocated that to Romania.

No harm was done, I didn't enter a Credit Card number, my Amazon password was changed but there's no credit card associated with that and I got it reset through the Associates support pretty quickly.

The thing is, I really believed I would never get caught by such a scam - I've been online for too long. Maybe I've become lazy because I've become used to clicking on embedded links in MySpace emails to see any messages. Maybe I'm just an idiot looking for a village.