It's come to my attention that some futures.io (formerly BMT) members who have been in contact with another forum member by email or for his webinars are getting spammed by email.

Some of those members have accused futures.io (formerly BMT) of doing the spamming, so I want to set the record straight.

1) futures.io (formerly BMT) has never shared your email address with anyone. Never. We do not sell/rent/exchange email lists with anyone. We handle all of our own email servers. Your email address has never been disclosed to anyone by us. Our machines have never been compromised, and the email address you provided us has never been spammed by us or through any action on our part.

2) When you contact a futures.io (formerly BMT) member via email, you expose your own email address to them. This is a decision you made.

3) Many people's computers are infected with malware. Most people don't even know what malware is, much less know how to prevent it or whether or not their computer is infected.

4) When you email someone who is infected with malware, your email address is now being shared with all kinds of other spam/malware bots, simply by "association". So even if your computer is clean, if the person who emailed is infected, then your email address is now compromised. This is because the malware is designed to scan email contacts, address books, etc, and blast emails out to any address it can find.

5) A specific example: not long ago, another forum member asked people to contact him via email, or to sign up for webinars he was presenting. I signed up once to see what was going on. Another forum member sent a mass-email to all people who had contacted him, using the cc: field instead of bcc: field, thereby exposing everyones email address. If just one person in that list was infected with malware, then the entire email list is now compromised (anyone who had contacted the other member).

6) Once your email address is compromised by one of these malware programs, it spreads and you start getting junk mail. You can't ever stop it.

What you should do:

a) Routinely check your computer for malware. Do a google search and only trust highly recommended and verifiable companies, malwarebytes is often recommended. Often times malware masquerades as malware checkers/preventers themselves. The irony.

b) Use PM's to communicate with other members when you don't want to post on the public forum, as opposed to using email. PM's come from our "[email protected]" address, and not your own email, so your email is protected.

c) If you do decide to email another futures.io (formerly BMT) member, do not get mad at me or blame futures.io (formerly BMT) for spamming you or violating your privacy or selling your email address. Simply not true.

I am only posting this here because I know for sure that someone on another forum member's email list was infected with malware, because the address I used to sign up for his webinar started getting spammed not long after.

BTW, I do not blame the other forum member and neither should you. Although he did indeed make a mistake to use cc: instead of bcc: when sending out a mass email, in reality there is very little you can do to prevent being spammed once you decide to start emailing other people. The other forum member's intent and heart are in the right place - to help others. This is simply a technical consequence once a decision was made to start communicating outside and away from futures.io (formerly BMT) posts themselves. I also am not accusing the other forum member's computer of being infected with malware. His machine could be 100% clean and this still have happened when he sent that email out using cc: instead of bcc:, exposing everyones email addresses on his list. All it took was one person on that list to be infected in order to compromise everyones email address.

Think of it like this: If you are in a very large room with hundreds of people, and you shout out your credit card number, there is a chance someone in that room is going to do something bad with it. Using a cc: vs bcc: on his emails was like shouting out all of your email addresses to everyone else in the room. All it takes is one bad person (malware) in the "room", and now everyones address is compromised.

If you are in fact receiving spam mail, don't click any links. It might look financial related "hot stocks" and so forth. Don't click anything. Best thing you can do is setup a new email address on futures.io (formerly BMT) and other sites, and stop using the old one, and then be extremely careful when you give out your email address in the future. You can trust me (futures.io (formerly BMT)) because I have an extremely strong technical background and have put a lot of measures in place to ensure your privacy and data are safe, but you can see just how it easy it is --- even with the absolute best of intentions --- to accidentally reveal your email address to a spammer. Once again, I want to make it clear I do not believe the other forum member is a spammer. Absolutely not. If you think I am accusing him then please re-read my post, as that is not at all what I am saying.

Thanks.