When the internet opened its gates to the general public many years ago now
the doors to people with less good intentions also opened up.
Luckily there are many more good intentions out there than
those who are looking to defy and defeat good people.
Over the past few months it has been brought to my attention
on a couple of occasions that there are emails circulating which may or may not
contain the name of businesses that I am related to or responsible for in terms
of the Laughter Yoga World.
My first REAL hack of www.unitedmind.co.uk, was in 2007 – a real
hack where my website was temporarily taken over by another page.
Second time was not a real hack but more an email issue that should probably
have been picked up by my hosting company but they didn’t.
I had an auto-responder
set for when I was away and for some reason a spam or spoofing email kept
replying back to me when I sent my ‘Out of Office’ it would reply and I
would respond again with my ‘Out of Office’ and so the loop continued until I
had used up my traffic max and my website became unavailable.
There were 77K or
more emails in my inbox and I could not access it because my data limit had
been exceeded. Got it sorted with my hosting after lenthy discussions but I was offline for a few hours which is not good for any type of business.
These are just examples of how things can go horribly wrong and
fortunately in my case it was just for a very short period of time as I am in the position where
I can work it out myself.
So.
Getting back to the recent cyber crimes which they
essentially are. These are emails suggesting that my businesses are either
working with an SEO company or the latest one that Laughter Association UK has
a mailing list of 700+ contacts that can be purchased at $195 or similar.
Let me reassure you that there are NO LISTS available for
sale from Laughter Association UK nor from UnitedMind Ltd, The Laughter Company
(TLC) Ltd or any other business with which I association myself, and there
never have been.
All offences or presumed offences have been reported to the National Fraud & Cyber Crime Reporting Centre.
I am a publicly findable person on the internet but I take personal and professional
privacy very seriously. UnitedMind Ltd, The Laughter Company (TLC) Ltd and
Laughter Association UK have very strict privacy policies which are in line with
the GDPR and any data protection acts applicable.
Please be aware that there are spammers, scammers, phishers,
spoofers, fraudsters and all sorts out there who will email you even when you think you are
safe from spam, the GDPR does not guarantee this at all.
A TIP! If your name is not in
the To-field AND you have not requested the information AND you don’t know the
person AND there is no personal greeting and lots of other signs, don’t even
bother but bin it straight away.
Please let me know if you have any questions - lotte@unitedmind.co.uk.
I am quite visible on the internet and happy to be found
because sharing Laughter Yoga is important to me and if no one was able to find me
or the people I work with then it kind of defeats the whole idea of what we aim
to do to, share world peace through laughter.
Always with the best of intentions, a big heart, and lots of
love and laughter.
Stay safe - in life and online!
Lotte Mikkelsen
Laughter Yoga Master Trainer
#youreverydaylaughterqueen
