There’s no doubting it. SPAM is Internet cyber-crime at it’s best. What’s worse is that it’s white-collar crime targeted at people just like you and me.
SPAM is a way for techno-savvy criminals to run their scams and cons with one purpose in mind: to part careless people from their money. And there are so many careless people. Statistically half the world has only a basic knowledge of email. Coupled with thousands of newbie's entering the email world every day Spammers are not short of gullible victims.
Gullible victims that feel the urge to click “REMOVE” in email messages supposedly erroneously sent to them. Every time they do this they validate their email address on a list of “People who responded” allowing the list of active addresses to be sold to other Spammers. Spam is a business. The more you click “REMOVE” the more Spam you will get.
YAHOO has been telling us this for years. As a totally random exercise I created a new account at a free email provider. Within four hours I received three Spam messages. Clicking “REMOVE” on those messages brought another 15 within an hour – an increase of some 400%. Burdening myself further I clicked “REMOVE” on eight of the 15 messages and signed-up to “free” offers on six of the advertised sites (although I doubt I will ever get my “free gift”).
It’s been four days and the email box is now at 423, no, 426 Spam messages. So in just four days my Spam has increased 14,100%.
Every society in the world has its conmen, swindlers, cheats, thieves and petty criminals. On the Internet they become Spammers, Crackers and Hackers and they all work together to form a nearly untraceable wide spread network of cyber-criminals. Few of these criminals are ever caught and fewer still are prosecuted and with so many at large their gullible victims are in real trouble.
These cyber-criminals work hard at crafting their special scheme be it mortgage loans, credit loans, debt reduction, stock forecasts or whatever but their plan is clear. What they are really after is your credit card number, hard-earned money and other personal data for their Identity-theft scheme.
It’s been confirmed too. Identify-theft is the fastest growing crime in the world and a fair portion of it comes directly from responding to Spam.
Unfortunately the gullibility does not stop there. Not all Spam comes directly from swindlers. Some of it originates from real people thinking they’re working for a legitimate business selling their life insurance, health insurance or lending products. These “sales persons” were themselves recruited by Spammers advertising via email or newspapers advertising those lucrative “work from home” jobs. They don’t know it but they’re working for criminals. Criminals sometimes operating from prison.
These are the total strangers who say “Here’s the information you requested” when you didn’t. The strangers who just write to say “Hi” or the stranger who just so happens to have seen you and has a crush on you.
Users of Internet-banking, eBay, PayPal and Western Union are at a great risk too. They receive messages identical in every way to that of the on-line service asking for registrant information or confirmation for one good reason or another. The link they supply is the link of your on-line service but secretly in the background your information is being fed directly to the criminal’s cyber-headquarters.
These scams are given cute names like “spoofing” and “phishing” and completely belie the incredible danger that the victim is in. Downplaying the danger yet alerting you to it is vital to on-line business.
Does it pay to Spam? This article in TheRegister indicates that 80% of the Internet’s Spam originates from 200 professional gangs. This report by research firm IDC predicts annual email volumes to be at around 97bn with more than half attributed to Spam. Clearly with such large volumes of email a Spammer needs only a small percentage of respondents to be successful.
The moral of the story: Don’t click “REMOVE”. Don’t respond to Spam and most certainly do not volunteer information of any nature because an email asked you to do so.
Our future articles will discuss anti-spam techniques and the best steps to take to protect yourself.