Barry Margolin wrote:
> In article <telecom24.556.2@telecom-digest.org>, Jennifer C. Kerr
> <ap@telecom-digest.org> 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, barmar@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.
The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today?
(c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co.
[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]
Steven Lichter (shlichter@diespammers.com)