Return of the Spam! For well over a year, my AOL email was relatively free of spam, but in recent weeks spam has returned with a vengeance. Every day I am besieged by multiple scams — millions of dollars I can share in if only I give over my banking information to strangers in Nigeria; millions of dollars or euros I have won in 'European' lotteries I did not enter; businesses looking for agents to receive payments from U.S. customers; dying philanthropists who want to give me money for my good works — and businesses that want to sell me Viagra or other drugs (real or counterfeit) that I don't need or want, advertising services I have no use for, etc.
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What happened?
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Plainly the governments of the world have no desire to protect recipients of email, because almost no one who uses email to defraud is ever prosecuted. Some greedy, desperate fools are actually fooled by the Nigerian scammers. I have seen two on TV court shows who admitted to a national, syndicated audience that they sent hundreds of dollars to strangers in foreign countries to get in on a good deal.
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Why does massive defrauding of Americans rouse no indignation nor prosecutorial effort by our various state and national governments?
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Why do we have to protect ourselves? Isn't protecting people the very first job of government?
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Perhaps people defrauded by email scams should take the amounts they lost off their income tax as an offset to protection the government owed them. Maybe we need a national movement of crime victims to demand that losses to crime be tax-deductible. Then we might see government galvanized to do its job of protecting the public from bunco artists at home and abroad. Maybe we'd even see a worldwide embargo thrown up around Nigeria until the government there ends this crime spree that could not operate without the active or passive complicity of the Nigerian government. I suspect a few smart bombs slamming into the Nigerian ministry of justice headquarters would produce a change in behavior pronto.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,515.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:43 PM