Assessing the Risks


In addition to the huge annoyance factor, spam undermines your confidence in e-mail and opens you up to many fraudulent ploys. One FTC report indicated that 66 percent of spam contained "false or misleading information in the sender line, subject line, or message content."

Spam also drives enormous costs on to service providers who have to gear up to handle the billions of spam communications sent daily. Development teams have to constantly create new rules to try to block the deluge in a seemingly never-ending cycle as spammers find new holes to crawl through. For example, MSN Hotmail blocks over 3.2 billion spam messages every day. Over 90 percent of incoming messages are spam, and Hotmail's filtering processes catch over 95 percent of those spam messages.

While the battle against e-mail spam rages on, the problem is spreading to new services and devices. Spam plagues mobile communications and any Internet service through which users can be contacted. Spam is found on classified advertising and auction sites and is posted in chat rooms, on discussion boards, in IM and blogs (as mentioned in the last two chapters), and more.

Find Out More

For more information about risks you can avoid while instant messaging, see Chapter 8, "Step 5: Don't Expose Yourself Through Instant Messaging." To learn more about ways to protect yourself while blogging, see Chapter 9, "Step 6: Reduce Your Vulnerability When Blogging."


Telltale Signs of Spam Scams

Here are some telltale signs that identify an e-mail scam:

  • You don't know the sender of the message.

  • You are promised untold sums of money for little or no effort on your part.

  • You are asked to provide money and/or information up front for questionable activities, to provide a processing fee, or to pay the cost of expediting the process.

  • You are asked to provide or verify your bank account number or other personal financial information, even if the sender offers to deposit money into your account.

  • It looks like it comes from a bank or company you know and asks you to click on a link to their site or respond to the e-mail to validate information.

  • The request contains a sense of urgency.

  • The sender repeatedly requests confidentiality.

  • The sender offers to send you photocopies of government certificates, banking information, or other "evidence" that their activity is legitimate.

  • The subject line looks compelling or suggests that the message is in response to some action you took, such as placing an order or requesting an insurance quote.

Spammers are smart. They know how to pique your curiosity, flatter you, and challenge you. No matter the effect, if it gets you to open the e-mail and respond in some way, they win.


Facing the Fraud

Different people fall for different types of scams, so these messages might announce that "you've won" a sweepstakes or some other prize. Or they might look like an official survey that asks your opinion. Once you've answered the questions, they throw in a few more about age, address, and income bracket. Or they use any other likely hook that can reel you in.

Even the cleverest people might fall prey to an e-mail scam, so it's worth knowing some of the typical ploys so you can spot them when they land in your inbox.

Here are some popular e-mail scams to be aware of:

  • Some bulk e-mail displays links that look like they will take you to one Web site, but actually take you to another. This ploy could cause you to enter sign-in information for your bank's site, ISP, or an online auction or payment site. In fact, you have actually landed on a cleverly disguised but phony site, called a phishing site, run by a criminal hoping to capture your information.

    Find Out More

    To learn more about phishing and other financial scams, see Chapter 14, "Step 11: Get Savvy About Financial Scams and Fraud."


  • E-mail urban legends are also on the rise. They might simply hook you into forwarding a startling "news" story to everybody you know, or ask you to take other actions. There are actually urban legend Web sites, such as www.snopes.com, www.urbanlegends.about.com, and www.hoaxbusters.ciac.org, where you can check whether an e-mail message you received presents factual information or a fictionalized version of information presented as fact. The goal for the original sender is often to increase the size of their distribution lists both for themselves and for the resale value of e-mail addresses on the open market.

  • Free rarely means free. These free product offers usually turn out to be pyramid schemes that require you to earn points toward your "free" product by providing personal information and by getting other people to join the scheme.

Communicating Safely

When you communicate using e-mail, you open a channel for communication just like you do when you turn on your cell phone. To protect yourself from harassing or annoying e-mail, and from revealing your location or other personal information through your e-mail, be aware of the following issues.

  • What is your e-mail address telling about you? In choosing an e mail address, you might be giving away information about yourself you don't really want to share with everybody to whom you send an e-mail. People often choose their own name or a name that includes their school or town, or identifies gender, for example. This is useful not only to spammers, but to a whole host of cybercriminals.

  • E-mail signatures at the bottom of your messages are a handy way to include your contact information when communicating with people you know. These typically provide your full name, often a work title, an address, and a home phone, cell phone, and fax number. However, if they are inserted automatically in all your e-mail responses, you might unwittingly reveal more information than you intended to share with people you don't know. How they choose to use that information is up to them.

Think About It

Sexual predators quite often convince children to provide their e-mail addresses so they can communicate with them on a regular basis and share things such as identifying pictures or pornography. These people might also teach the children how to erase any record of e-mail sent to or received from the predator.




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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