I always love reading about a good scam - luckily I've never* been sucked in myself by one of these dodgy schemes, and the more of them you read about, the better you get at picking them. A good listing of some of the more common scams is here.
* Well, I did almost sent in some of my Paypal account details once in response to an phishing email - there are lots of emails purporting to be from Paypal that either request you to "confirm" your account details, "reactivate" your account, or pretend that your paypal account has paid some money to a company you've never heard of. In each case, they're just phishing for you account info. Unfortunately, these emails often look just like a real Paypal email, complete with the corrects fonts, content, layout, logos etc. and although you can often tell by the senders address, or the URL links to (such as http://paypal.dodgyco.com/paypal.htm) sometimes it's very hard to tell without some higher level internet snooping ability. These days I just ignore ALL emails that purport to be from paypal, which means I never get to read any newsletters or official notification emails. I really wish that email was NOT free - if there was a small charge (say 5c) to send an email, 99.9% of all spam and phishing emails would disappear as it wouldn't be profitable any more.
Scams, shams and shame
December 15th, 2006 at 01:15 pm
December 15th, 2006 at 02:29 pm 1166192950
It would be nice if they could do something about spam though. There was a neat service for a while that you reported spam to and they sent a cease and desist letter to the spammers. The spammers started retaliating and shutting down huge websites (livejournal, gmail stuff like that) and the service was shut down due to pressure from the legitimate sites. So spammers are awfully powerful.
December 16th, 2006 at 02:55 am 1166237702