CYBERSPACE—Many members of the "porn community" awoke this morning to what appeared to be a desperate plea from veteran director Roy Karch.
In an email whose subject line read, "Awful Trip....Roy karch," came the following, poor punctuation and all:
"I'm writing this with tears in my eyes,my family and I came down here to London, United Kingdom for a short vacation. unfortunately,we were mugged at the park of the hotel where we stayed,all cash and credit card were stolen off us but luckily for us we still have our passports with us.
"We've been to the Embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all and our flight leaves in few hours from now but we're having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won't let us leave until we settle the bills. Well I really need your financial assistance..Please, let me know if you can help us out?
"Am freaked out at the moment!!
"Thanks,
"Roy"
Of course, people immediately wondered, "What family?", since no one is aware of any Karch children... and many felt the urge to find out just what was going on.
"I've been hacked! I've been phished!" Karch exclaimed when AVN spoke with him this morning. "I have people calling me from all over—everybody's calling, everybody's emailing, because everybody's worried, which is nice to know—but it's like, how many addresses do you have? They got all my addresses. But I'm okay."
It's not a particularly new phish, having been around since at least 2009, but it preys on people's feelings for their friends, and is ripe for hackers to exploit.
According to Karch, the problem began last evening, when he got an email that appeared to be from ISP SBCGlobal.
"It said, 'We need your password, please,' and sometimes you are asked when you log in for your password, so I gave it to them," Karch reported. "So at 5 this morning, my editor called me and said, 'Are you okay?' Well, I am okay, and I've now readjusted all my codes and stuff, but I don't have any more address book. It got stolen from me."
Karch is asking all of his former contacts to email him with their addresses so he can rebuild his contact list.
