Every week this site gets thousands of comments and emails from spammers. I can’t complain. It’s just another week in the life of a blogger. Besides, I have a comment and email spam filter that eliminates over 99.9% of the messages. However, the spam filters can’t stop confused people with compromised reasoning from posting messages that expose their own personal information.

Occasionally we get random emails from people willfully sending us such information. As much as possible, we politely tell them this is a bad idea and try point them in the right direction. This week has been exceptional though. Several people have taken it upon themselves to post credit card numbers, account numbers, names, addresses and even social security numbers to the site.

One poor woman, we’ll call her Susan, writes to tell us that her credit cards were stolen while traveling and that she’d like us to help her freeze her credit card accounts. Since she posted her financial data online, it’s fortunate that she’s already planning to cancel those cards. Another poster, we’ll call him Richard, leaves his name and credit card number for no obvious reason except a cryptic “RE:” Our least favorite commenter, whose real name is Timothy, writes us at length threatening to have his lawyer contact us unless we quit mailing credit card offers to his home. Sorry Tim, but we don’t mail credit card offers and we’ve yet to hear from your lawyer. He also claims to have called us three times.

To make matters worse, ALL of these posts were made to the public comments section of this site! Unfortunately, if you’re one of the people who would post this type of information to the comments section of the blog, you probably aren’t reading this post or any other part of the site where we talk about why NOT to give your personal financial information to anybody other than your financial institution. This can’t be reiterated enough:

• Don’t wear a t-shirt with your name and social security number printed on it.
• Don’t tack financial statements to lampposts.
• And under no circumstances should you post credit card numbers to the comment sections of blogs!