Re: Spam scams

Hi there,

Yes, I've enjoyed some of the
surrealist spams too.

BTW a lot of the spam nowadays is actualy
spam scam:

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/advice/20021025b.asp

I was quite astonished to find that out, that
most of it is actually criminal in nature, not
just the famous ones like the Nigerian bank
scam, but also all those mortgage e-mails and
so on, nearly all the ones I still get
seem to fall into the category of one of the
scams on that page, main aim is to get your
credit card details, or other sensitive
information, or they may do far
worse than that even. It says there that some of the
mortgage ones have the aim to get enough of
your details to be able to file for bankruptcy in
your name without your knowledge, and somehow
profit from that, so you lose your house,
and the spammers get some of the money somehow
(can't remember the details).

Some virus writers seem to have teamed up with spammers
to use viruses to relay their spam.

They have also got more sophisticated
at exploiting vulnerabilities. So it is probably advisable
to have a firewall as well as an Anti Virus program
- especially if one has the newer operating systems such as
XP, or 2K, or, if one uses Internet Explorer
as ones web browser. The firewall can stop the
worms from entering ones machine (which they
can do without you ever opening an e-mail
as you surf) and can stop them connectingout
too, e.g. to relay all those spam e-mails
- which they apparently do so unobrusively
that users with infected machines are quite
unaware of what is happening as they surf
(maybe just a little bit slower, that's all).

Hopefully we all know now that you should
never click on the unsubscribe link in an
e-mail as that just adds your name
to a list of "verified e-mail addresses"
most likely, also shouldn't even
look at a spam e-mail while on-line,
even if apparently plain text, it
may have invisible gifs in it that
alert the spammer, served by cgi
scripts so that they identify which
e-mail it is, so your e-mail
address,and other web stat type
details about your computer such
as time and time zone.

That worked very well indeed
last year, one could almost eliminate
spam entirely by using those tips,
but this year it doesn't prevent the virus
spread spam :-(.

But it probably stops it escalating a bit.
I only get maybe 30 spams a day now, though
last year I was getting much less than
that - that's not so much considering
that my e-mail address is on a
number of web pages.

Robert