Re: One in Four Netters Get Phony E-Mails

Barry Margolin wrote:

In article , Jennifer C. Kerr > wrote: >> About one in four Internet users is hit with e-mail scams every month >> that try to lure sensitive personal information from unsuspecting >> consumers, a study says. > Only one in four? I figure almost all netters get spam, and at least > 75% would get phishing spam. > Barry Margolin, snipped-for-privacy@alum.mit.edu > Arlington, MA > *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

Shoot, every day I get at least 6 telling me they want to buy stuff freom my store, I won a lottery; they I did not remember entering or that my Ebay, PayPal, or other account is being violated. Funny I don't use the e-mail account for any of them. It all started with just one post here before I got my e-mail client to crunch my address, before that never got one. The Nigerians are going to have to do a better job of killing off the scammers, now they are moving to Romania and Russia.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: All you get each day is only six? I get six each day from people doing bogus PayPal entries, and a couple dozen more from people impersonating various other banks. Over all, I get 30-40 phish attempts daily, an additional 20-30 viruses, and at least 150-200 'regular' spams (many of which fall directly into my spam file, but not all of them.) All the above is just my account here at massis.lcs.mit.edu on behalf of telecom. A good thing about a text- based account (like here at massis) is that those html-based items (spam, scam and phish) stand out like a sore thumb; their size is so large (even a very short spam can easily take 50-75 K) as opposed to a legitimate text-based email (usually 3-5 K) that you can spot them almost immediatly without reading anything other than maybe one line or so. Now, with my personal Cableone.net account although the ratio of virus/spam/scam is about the same as Telecom mail (85-90 percent junk), at least cableone.net screens it out before showing it all to me. What they percieve to be unwanted junk, they put in various folders for me so that one click gets rid of it all even though it is all html-based. What is amazing about some phishers and other con-artists there are the ones who go to so much trouble to actually 'invent' an entire bank (not just divert the front page in order to capture your data before then turning you over to the real bank). These guys make up an entire bogus bank to convince victims that the (bogus) bank is holding some sum of money for them as 'next of kin' or associate of the 'bank officer' who wants to transfer a huge amount of money to you, etc, as long as you first part with your life savings to them.

But Steve, I guess we should not complain, since after all, we live in the United States under the governorship of ICANN and Vint Cerf, and as one of the readers here would say (a real First Amendment nut if ever one existed) we dasn't dictate how others 'run their sites' or the contents therein. And as another old fool reading this message would proclaim, it is wrong to return such mail to the _LEGITIMATE_ and _BONAFIDE_ senders of same, since doing so might be construed as a Denial of Service for them and cause us to get sued or imprisoned for causing _them_ grief for doing that. I don't know about you, Steve, but I am about ready to pack a lunch and a clean pair of underwear and report to the nearest prison. That probably is where I belong, as an enemy of ICANN, and all the 'good and decent' things the net has become under their governorship, taking all my complaints with me. PAT]