I don’t know about you, but Diane and I each get several offers per week for credit cards from Capital One. I’ve got enough credit cards already, and I’ve got better things to do than shred mail, so I decided to find out how to get off their mailing list.

There is, of course, no phone number listed anywhere on the offer I got today (and no legal disclosure of the terms and conditions, either). They want you to apply via their website (which I will not link to!); that site doesn’t have much information, either, but there is a privacy link, and by looking carefully through the privacy page, I found the phone number to call to opt-out. It is 1-888-817-2970, then 1 (for English) and then “*” because I don’t have an account. A few seconds later, I was talking to a human being (blowing their profit margin away, what a shame!), and if I’m lucky, I’ll be off their damn list in two more days.

Spam, Scam, Spam, Scam

I just got a piece of e-mail claiming to be a e-card from “Cardwish”. When I tried to fetch it, their server said that there was a problem and it wasn’t available — then I noticed that the page they were displaying had an interestingly-misformed URL. Apparently, not only are they a scam operation, but they’re trying to take advantage of vulnerabilities in various levels of IE to do Bad Things to your computer.

Lessons learned:

1) Not all e-cards are legitimate. I still trust cards from Blue Mountain, American Greetings, and Yahoo.

2) An e-card note that just says that you have a card without at least giving a subject or sender is probably a scam.

3) Keep your browser patches up to date!