Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Despicable behavior from a Korat forum Administrator


About a year and a half ago I joined a well known korat forum. I'don't want to say the name of the forum but I will tell you that it is a copy of the original koratfarang forum. The difference being a hyphen strategically placed within the name. What I have discovered that the admin of that forum is doing and continues to do is shocking. In the past I suspected something wasn't right when I tried to log in to my account only to find that I was unable to because the forum displayed that I was already logged in. How is that possible? Some of my PM's which I had never read before were already marked as read. It didn't dawn on me on what was going on until I spoke to a fellow koratian this afternoon at a popular expat bar who is also a member of that forum and experienced the same things I did. What this person shared with me was disturbing. Apparently what the admin of that forum is doing is logging into people's accounts and going through their private messages and profile information. How is he able to do this you might ask? I will tell you how. When I originally joined his forum he assigned a password for me. It was never chosen by me or assigned to me by the forum mechanism. It was selected by the administrator and carefully put together with the initials of my first and last name and date I joined. This is how he created and assigned passwords to his new members. I was stupid enough not to change it for quite sometime which allowed him to go through every private message I had ever written along with every private message that was sent to me. Some of those private messages contained some very personal information like home addresses and phone numbers. Several inquires I sent via email to the admin were never answered. At that time I thought it would be a good idea to change my password and the problem would go away. I was wrong. I discovered today that my password was changed again sometime within the past two days because I am unable to log in. I even tried to reset my password using the forgot password function of the forum but never once received an email with a link to reset my password. I am convinced 100% that this is the doing of the admin. The admin of a forum can change any member's password then use it to log in to anyone's account. I am at a loss of words as I cannot understand why someone would do something so low as this. There is a certain element of trust when you join forums and discussion groups and are asked to provide personal information in order to create an account. When someone does something disturbing like what this admin has done it destroys the trust, faith and confidence within the community. I am mortified.

I have sent an email to that admin firmly stating to delete my account and all posts I have made or associated with me to be deleted. I won't hold my breath as I have not received a response yet and I don't expect one either.

I am making my story public because I want to warn people to be careful and hope that they don't fall victim to this as I have. If you have not changed your password on that forum do it as soon as possible. DO NOT KEEP THE PASSWORD HE ASSIGNS YOU!!!!! Be careful about any information you have saved in your private mailbox and profile. There is a wealth of personal data and information that can be collected without your knowing.

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