Compromised E-mail Accounts and Spam

NOTE: ALL E-MAIL AND WEB ADDRESSES ARE FAKE OR MADE UP FROM MY MIND TO PROVIDE AS SIMILAR EXAMPLES FOR THIS DISCUSSION WITH THE EXCEPTION OF E-MAIL OR WEB ADDRESS INFORMATION INDICATED IN THE LETTER SAMPLES, WHICH ARE DERIVED FROM REAL FAKE SCAMMER LETTERS RECEIVED. CHASE AND FACEBOOK AND OTHER EXAMPLES MENTIONED AND REFERENCED THROUGHOUT THE ARTICLES ARE ALSO DERIVED FROM REAL SCAMS. DUE TO THE NATURE OF MOST SCAMMER SITES AND E-MAIL ADDRESSES (AS SOME MAY DERIVE THEIR WEB ADDRESS NAMES BASED ON MISPELLINGS OR VARIATIONS OF A LEGITIMATE SITE) IT IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED FOR YOU TO ATTEMPT TO VISIT THESE SITES SINCE THE CONTENT HAS NOT BEEN VISITED NOR VERIFIED AND I WILL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYONE VISITING ANY SITE OR CONTACTING ANYONE IN THESE SAMPLE E-MAILS AT THEIR OWN RISK.

As the Internet grows older, e-scams are becoming more and more intricate, and with the development of image editing and rendering on graphics editing programs, e-mails and other fraudulent websites can now look more and more like the official site. E-mails with sob stories and unexpected lottery winnings also raid your e-mail. Just recently, I found over 199 e-mails in an extremely old e-mail account of mine I had not looked into in years, and discovered that 99% of these e-mails were from numerous scammers trying to find a potential target.

So, it's important that even if you personally feel savvy enough to avoid these scams, it's still vital to become familiar in other practices on how to protect yourself and lend out helpful tips to others, especially to younger children and others not too well versed with computers and the Internet, to help them avoid being caught in the lies of a scammer.

Compromised E-mail Accounts and Spam

As mentioned in a previous entry on e-mail safety, even e-mails are now compromised rapidly by marketing and scamming sites to send spam to everyone in your address book posing as you. These e-mails usually contain links and off-topic comments on "cool websites to check out", which usually turn out to be a whole scam in itself. Several of these sites, carrying from electronics from overseas to "support pages" fool you into trusting them as agreeable resource sites, yet many of these stores fail to even sell and do business accordingly at all.

But with that, it's is extremely important to never click on any foreign link that seems fishly. If the link or icon says one thing, such as Free DVDs but shows some strange link in the bottom left corner that says: http: // zzjlkjsfdk . net / and it doesn't seem quite right to you, trust your gut. It is highly likely that you're going to be right.

A good tip is to try going onto any search engine (I typically use Google) and type the name of the site, in this case zzjlkjsfdk . net. I don't reccommend copying and pasting the whole actual link since the search engine may not compute as many results, but on a daily basis, just naming the site usually will bring up a number of results. It is highly likely that the website is a scam if the results on the search engine pinpoint to other sites, such as government or even just anti-fraud database sites. And if you're even more curious, you could write the name of the site and "scam" as the search tags to see if the results link a strong relationship between one and another.

It's also important to know that if it is indeed a scam, then it is very likely that others have received similar e-mails as well, and they too, might be online asking around if this is a scam. By looking around (but never click the site itself until you deem it safe!) on other anti-scam sites (if you find the site in question mentioned there) and collectively putting the results together, you can then come to a more reasonable conclusion of whether you want to avoid visiting the site or, if you find good, hard proof that it is legitmate, can visit it. However, it is important to know that it is unlikely any special offers or anything that's promoted as FREE is legitimate. It doesn't rule out some other legitimate free sites, yet be prepared to proceed with caution about dealing with anything that is advertised as free or lucrative towards your pocket.

Also, in regards to the e-mail compromising scams, even if (as apparently some sites do sell legitimate items on these strange sites) the site is legitimate, would you feel all-too trusting of a website and business that makes its advertising through hacking you and your friends and family's e-mail addresses?