By Tracy Moore, Neighbourhood Watch and Bill Cunningham, Scamwatch
Shepperton Neighbourhood Watch update
By Tracy Moore
I thought I would start this month with explaining what Neighbourhood Watch (NhW) is.
Local Neighbourhood Watch schemes work in a variety of ways that reflect the needs of the local community, examples being sharing crime prevention advice and infor-mation; running awareness campaigns; leading community projects, such as litter picks or flood defence response.
Neighbourhood watch is a voluntary group of residents with a local Coordinator with the goal of making their community better and safer place to live. This is via two platforms.
Street watches – residents from your street joining together with one coordinator being on hand to advise and provide updates to the other street residents. Please email sheppertonnhw@gmail.com for details of your local street watch or if this is something you feel like you can assist with, please also get in touch.
The Cover watch, which is an on-line Facebook group platform for the village and anyone can join, ran by the village coordinator. Thank you to all that have joined so far and for those of you that want to join, please search for ‘shepperton nhw’ within Facebook ‘groups’.
Main aims of the Shepperton street and cover watch (es);
- Reduce / prevent local crime and disorder
- Reduce fear of crime
- Address issues relating to anti social behaviour
- Create safer neighbourhoods
- Assist in the detection and apprehension of criminals through members providing information to the police
- Improve quality of life and the local environment
Pass the Password!
By Bill Cunningham
Our most important accounts are our email, social media and especially our online banking accounts, or any account with bank details attached to.
And for sure we don’t want anyone …
- Accessing our bank account
- Purchasing items online with our money
- Impersonating us on social networking and dating sites
- Sending emails in our name
- Accessing the private information held on our computer
So it’s important we have strong and separate passwords for each account.
With access to our email, hackers can take control of all our online accounts. Simply by asking for the password to be reset, to use then that information. Our email contents can easily be pieced together to create a profile of our identity.
We should never use any word which is related to ourselves and which may be easy to guess – for example by looking at our social media pages and finding our dog’s name say!!
On social media it’s best we understand clearly that a lot of people can find out a lot about us. That is a LOT. Same with all other social media. Just type our name and see where it leads to. With our name and town of residence it’s easy peasy to build up a picture. Scary really.
Anyway – back to passwords – We should NEVER ever use:
- Current partner’s name
- Child’s name
- Other family members’ name
- Pet’s name
- Place of birth
- Favourite holiday
- Our favourite sports team
- Especially NOT PASSWORD, 1066, abc123, QUERTY.
Let’s pick something memorable to just us and then sprinkle with a number and also maybe :::, say.
Met our nearest and dearest at Brighton way back ? If so could use 83briGhtoN££ for it’s maybe mean-ingful! Or B83::mAny££s