Tech Directions - January 2008 - (Page 14)

mastering computers 2 Reid Goldsborough reidgold@netaxs.com Dealing with E-mail Scams Dear Reader, Can you help me? I’m nearly finished writing what’s bound to be a best-selling book about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To pay my rent and support my invalid wife, our two disabled children and my dear elderly parents, I’ve used up nearly all of the advance I received from my publisher. If you would be so kind as to transfer to me a small sum of money, I promise to share with you the tremendous royalties that my book is destined to earn. We all get scam solicitations like this. With the popularization of the Internet, the number of these scams has skyrocketed. To most of us, they’re transparent enough, but email scams do hook their victims. Approximately 1.2 million U.S. computer users suffered “phishing” losses of more than $900 million between May 2004 and May 2005, according to market research firm Gartner. Phishing involves e-mails (and sometimes instant messages and phone calls) aimed at persuading you to provide details about your credit card, bank account, online payment service, or eBay password. Other e-mail scams, called “advanced fee fraud,” involve attempts to persuade you to pay a relatively small fee in order to realize a much larger gain, as I did with my spoof scam at the beginning of this column. The scammer might indicate you’ve inherited money from an uncle you didn’t know you had, but to collect it you need to pay legal fees first. Or you won a lottery but need to pay a small fee of only $100 to obtain your prize. The most well-known advanced fee frauds have been initiated by crooks in Nigeria who e-mail their potential victims that they’re having difficulty transferring money out of their country and need help. This is in violation of Section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code, which is the reason that advance fee frauds in general are sometimes called 419 scams. Anti-spam filters used by Internet service providers or security suites such as Symantec’s Norton Internet Security (www.symantec.com) and McAfee Internet Security Suite (www.mcafee.com) stop most of these scam e-mails. But “You can’t win a lottery you some slip through. didn’t enter. Chances are very One option is to simply delete the eslim you inherited something mails, says Eve from someone you never Edelson, author of the heard of.” new book Scamorama: Turning the Tables On E-mail Scammers. “You doesn’t anymore. “I regard myself as can’t win a lottery you didn’t enter. a curator of advance fee scam and Chances are very slim you inherited scambaiting correspondences.” something from someone you never Some scammers, says Edelson, heard of.” are sole proprietors. Others are Another option is learning to read members of gangs in which the boss the headers of the e-mails. You can owns a room full of computers and sometimes get a scammer’s Internet phone lines. A 19th century French access cancelled this way, says version used the postal service. The Edelson. Her book provides tips for scammer wrote letters to royalist people so motivated. sympathizers indicating he was a It’s generally not worth it to try servant to an aristocrat who had to get the legal authorities involved. been condemned by the Revolution. Because the scams usually originate The scammer revealed that he knew in a foreign country, prosecuting where his master hid his fortune. them is difficult. The U.S. Secret But, he wrote, it will take some Service reportedly won’t intervene money to mount an expedition. unless you’ve suffered losses of at The more things change. . . . least $50,000. Don’t go too far, though. Some Finally, you can “scambait” the victims of 419 scams who traveled scammers, leading them on in thinkabroad to try to recoup their losses ing they’re about to strike pay dirt have reportedly been murdered. with you. Among those who do it, says Edelson, there’s psychological satisfaction to be had. Edelson’s book and the accompanying Web site (www.scamorama. com) discuss these pranks, some of which are hilarious, as well as the sometimes ruinous scams that prompt them. Edelson, who’s a system administrator for a California research institution, says she’s never been a victim herself. She put up the Web site, in 1999, to amuse her friends. At first, the site just documented scam attempts. Then people began forwarding to her the e-mails they sent back to scammers. Scambaiters sometimes pretend to be cartoon or historical characters, and they can make up really wild stories, keeping scammers coming back for months or even years in hope of the big score. Instead, they wind up on Edelson’s Web site, and now in her book, which provides more detail. Edelson used to scambait but 14 techdirections ◆ JANUARY 2008 http://www.scamorama.com http://www.scamorama.com http://www.symantec.com http://www.mcafee.com

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Tech Directions - January 2008

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