Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Exposing the top email scams

Exposing the top email scams can be a little frustrating, as no matter how many people are out there trying to highlight the latest scams, new ones are being invented all the time, including ones that relate to a particular event, say a natural disaster, and encapsulate all that's bad with modern society.

Firstly, they say that there's only five original jokes and that every new joke is an amended version of one of those five. Well, you could well say that there's only one original scam email and that every new one is just a new version of that.

Simply, scam emails peddle a lie and the art of the spammer is to get people to fall for it.

And such is the sophistication of many of the spammers, it's a wonder that emails are believed at all. Possibly it's only the cleverness of some of the anti-virus software programmes and vigilance of the internet providers that have stopped the system crashing from spam overload.

It's sobering to think that if only people would stop falling for the emailer hoaxers and ignored them, then criminal gangs behind all the cons and frauds would be out of business overnight.

So, virtually everyone who gets email gets spam. It's an almost symbiotic relationship. One comes with the other. And remember, the original scam email contained a lie: it's a false promise that if you do something, say pay money, something good will happen. And every new spam is a new version of that.

And the best scam of all, the African money offer. In a way, you've got to hand it to these hoaxers. In the good old days many people would get long, convoluted letters explaining that the writer is a deposed prince of a corrupt country that has access to ten million dollars and he needs someone's help to get his money out of the country. If only the readers could spare a few thousand pounds to enable the prince to process the papers giving him access to the ten million, then the prince, in true generosity and reward, would give that person say a couple of million in return. Too good to be true? It was.

Yet when that con was done to death, along came the internet and email and the African con was born again. And this time there was a bonus. Compared to a letter, an email is dirt cheap; fractions of a penny, so the theory goes that if you send out enough, many millions, then all you need is the smallest amounts of pick-up and you will succeed with enough to make yourself as rich as nevermind a prince, but a King.

And the other top scams include false software offers (dirt cheap but never get delivered, or all you get is pirated software); ISP scams (false charges for services you've never had); bogus online auctions (promising great goods which never arrive); made-up telephone, or credit card charges (for nothing you've ever had); spurious loan offers (great APRs on bank loans, or mortgages that require an up-front fee for deals that don't exist); and invented work-from-home schemes (that, in return for a fee, offers you a salary that never turns up).

If there's one piece of advice you need to heed when it comes to email scams, is the one already highlighted above: if it's too good to be true, then it usually is.

Start being a cynic.

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