"Rose Mary" Flavored Spam

Last week a self-professed member of the CYC named Rose Mary requested membership to our web site.  Rose Mary listed a boat name, slip and pier number and even indicated being a member since 2001.  I checked the membership list and did not find a Rose Mary.  Not wanting to alienate a member and assuming that Rose Mary might be a first and middle name, I approved Rose Mary and asked her/him (you never know) to please change her/his name to reflect the first and last name.

It turns out that "Rose Mary" was an imposter.  Rose Mary then proceeded to spam many of our CYC members.  Cecile Gibson pointed this out in short order and I immediately banned her/him and scrubbed all the messages out of the system.  It seems Rose Mary looked at the profile info of one of our members that I did not know very well and used their information to sign up.  Sneaky.  Next time I will do a more thorough job of vetting potential members to the site.  

I suggest that any of our administrators who have the ability to approve new members check out the membership list.  If, after you check the list you are not sure if the person requesting membership is genuinely a CYC member, you might want to decline their request to join with a message to apply again and supply more information to prove they are a CYC member.

To those of you who received the spam, I apologize for the unwanted messages.  This is the first spammer that has gotten approved as a member, but is certainly not the first to try.  I will be more careful in the future.