Scamspam. Every single day we receive emailed attempts to rob us. I got 12 on one screenname today alone. Each day, the world's Internet service providers (ISP's) transmit BILLIONS of scamspams that attempt to defraud scores of millions of people out of thousands of dollars apiece. The U.S. Government does nothing about this. The state governments do nothing. The Government of Nigeria, the country that is the source of a large proportion of all such scams, does nothing about it, and may indeed be "in on it". This is an outrage, and people in every target country should demand that their government actively track down, prosecute, and imprison the guilty — and penalize the Government of Nigeria for its complicity in such crimes. The United Nations should organize worldwide sanctions against Nigeria to end this relentless campaign of massive fraud.
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That's the long-term solution. The short-term solution is for every email service provider to send a welcome email to every new subscriber, and at least once a year send a reminder email to all subscribers, warning of the most common scams. It should say something like this:
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(1) If you haven't entered a lottery, you haven't won a lottery. Period. Microsoft doesn't run lotteries that select people off the Internet without their entering. Nor does the government of the Netherlands, nor Britain, nor any other country or business or charity or any other legitimate enterprise of any kind anywhere on Earth.
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(2) No one is scouring the Internet looking for worthy private persons to send money to if only they will invest it in local development projects or charities. It doesn't matter if they are recent converts to Christianity dying from some dread disease.
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(3) If any foundation or charitable giver wants to give you money for your good works, they will send you a check by postal mail that you can deposit in your bank account without your ever having to do more than that to get the cash. You will not have to send them a prepayment "good faith deposit", "processing fee", or anything else, for even one cent, much less hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
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(4) Never give anyone you don't know the details of your bank account. Ever. Legitimate, aboveboard, legal transfers of funds can be done perfectly well by ordinary check sent by certified mail. They do not have to be wired to your account.
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(5) If you receive an offer from Africa or anyplace else to transfer millions of dollars into your bank account so they can get it out of the country past legal barriers, and for that service you will be granted some percentage of the proceeds, it is a scam, without question. Delete the email after reporting it to your email service. If it were an actual transfer against legal prohibitions, you would be guilty of complicity in a crime, in helping criminals evade the law.
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(6) If you are the legitimate, intended recipient of a bequest, you will never have to put up money to receive anything anyone leaves you in a will.
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(7) If you are asked to pose as the next of kin of someone who has died and left a large sum of money in an abandoned account, or to claim rights to an excess-funds account from an African government agency, national oil company, etc., you are being scammed.
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(8) Further, if you were even to try to do anything like that, you would be guilty of a crime that could send you to prison for a very long time. So if all you do is lose several thousand dollars because of your greed and criminal predilections, it will serve you right.
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(9) If someone says he has a business that needs a U.S. representative to process payments from American customers and forward the proceeds after deducting a percentage for yourself, you are being scammed. Merchant banks for legitimate businesses can process payments from every country on Earth. No legitimate business needs a private person in a foreign country to process payments for them.
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(10) There is no such thing as a pill that can enlarge the penis.
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(11) Legitimate pharmacies do not send spam emails to strangers. Those that do business via the Internet have websites that people come to of their own initiative. There are hefty fines for businesses that send out unsolicited commercial emails in bulk (spam). Having to pay such fines would more than overbalance any profit they might reap thru such a practice. Thus, if you order from such a business, you risk receiving bogus medications that are at best knockoffs, second-best are worthless panaceas (sugar pills or the like), and at worst chemicals that could be dangerous to your health — if, that is, they don't just take your money and send you nothing at all.
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(12) Legitimate stockbrokers do not send out announcements to strangers about great stocks that are just about to explode in value. The people who do that have themselves bought that stock in volume and want to pump up the price by inducing fools to buy those shares at a much higher price than they would ever be worth in a rational world, because there is no underlying strength to the business as to warrant such a high price. That's the best possibility. Another possibility is that the stock is a complete fraud that does not represent shares in anything.
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(13) If you receive email that appears to be from a bank, credit union, eBay, PayPal, or any other legitimate business that you have an account with, and that asks you to go to a link within that email, don't go. Hover your cursor over the ostensible link and see if what appears below agrees with the text of the link. The company you know should be the very first thing in the URL after the "http://", in exactly the correct form, e.g., "bankofamerica.com". If it is not, it is a scam. If the first item differs by even one character, e.g., "bankofamerica.net", or, as was tried by one scammer, "bankofarnerica" (that's lowercase RN, not M), it is a scam. If it is a little different as might be legitimate, e.g., "service.bankofamerica.com", still don't go via that link. Instead, go to the main website at the URL you always use and see if you can find the asserted site on your own. (Bank of America has in fact built in another level of security for its customers, a "SiteKey" you can check. If the SiteKey that appears is not correct, or if no SiteKey appears, you know not to type in your account info. Not all companies that work online have such a security measure, so the customer has to be very careful about where s/he types in account login and password information.)
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(14) If putting your mouse on a link does not produce a rollover box that reveals the actual destination of the link, do not go to that site. If you nevertheless, recklessly, should click on such a link, look at the fill-in box within your browser that shows the actual destination you have reached. If it is not what it is supposed to be, leave immediately, and report it to your ISP.
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The cautions above are the very fewest every ISP should issue to every subscriber every year. There may be others.
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Some ISP's will track down the scamsites they know about and block them as known "phishing" sites. "Phishing" is an attempt to get foolish (gentle word for "stupid") people to type in their account name and password so the phishers can later log into that account themselves and steal.
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We should not have to protect ourselves from thieves. That's one of the most fundamental of the responsibilities of government. But our governments won't protect us from scamspam, phishing, and other Internet fraud, so we have to protect ourselves.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,150 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:09 PM