Chapter Ten. Step 7: Understand Risks of Fraudulent Communications and Protect Yourself


Hal finished eating his frozen pizza and headed for his computer in the corner of the living room. He was waiting for an e-mail message from his friend Steve, who was sending him some strategies for the computer game they were going to play tonight.

As the time approached for their game, Hal checked his e-mail. There were two messages from Steve in the inbox. There were also six messages that seemed to have been sent by Hal but had bounced back to his account as undeliverable, and all of them had the same subject line, "Be A Hit w/Girls." He'd never sent out anything like that. Curious, he clicked on one and scanned the undelivered message. It had been sent out to somebody in the United Kingdom he'd never heard of. Hal was horrified as he realized the message was offering male sex "aids" using his e-mail address as the sender.

"Geez!" Hal said while deleting the messages, humiliated that his account might have been used in a method called spoofing to sell sex toys to thousands of people. Even as he was cursing the person who had used him in this way, the e-mail recipients were probably cursing his name and assuming he was the spammer. He'd heard about this, but this was the first time he was a victim.

After deleting the spoofed e-mail messages, Hal, trying to calm down, turned his attention to the e-mail from Steve. The first message's subject line read "just for you"; the second had no title at all. Hal, not wanting to be caught twice in one night, assumed the message with no subject might be bogus, so he clicked on the one titled "just for you." He was furious when he realized he'd been fooled again. What he saw was yet another piece of spam with a pornographic image, lurid text, and a link to a Web site that provided more of the same.

Hal clicked the "report junk mail" icon on his monitor screen so hard he almost broke his mouse. "It's getting so you just don't want to go online anymore," he mumbled to himself.



Look Both Ways. Help Protect Your Family on the Internet
Look Both Ways: Help Protect Your Family on the Internet
ISBN: 0735623473
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 157
Authors: Linda Criddle

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