Australian Pensioner a Victim of a 419 Scam

Here's a link to a news article about an Australian pensioner who was kidnapped, tied up and held for ransom in Gambia in a 419 Nigerian scam.

I can't believe, with all the publicity about this sort of thing that people are still falling for such obvious scams.

Is it greed or something else getting the victims caught out? Are they just too trusting?

1,000th Post

This is the one thousandth post to this blog, That's almost 1,000 spam emails posted here.

Considering that I probably only post 1% of the spam emails I get to one email address, it means that I have received over 100,000 spam emails since I started this blog. Can you imagine how many must be being sent around the world, to hundreds of millions of people.

Say there are 1 Billion email accounts in the world and the average email account was hit with 20,000 spam messages per year, that's a staggering 20 trillion spams using up valuable bandwidth and costing us all real money. Not to mention the poor fools who lose their cash to scammers spamming them.

Just remember, never send your credit card information in an email. You have not won the lottery! Unless you bought a ticket, you didn't even have a chance. No-one that you never heard of died and left you millions. Your bank won't contact you by email and tell you to update your details.

Take care out there.

P-P-P-Powerbook is 1337!!!111etc

I just came across the P-P-P-Powerbook site again. It's still funny even after all these years.

http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/

If you don't know, this is a legendary scam perpetrated by a smart would-be scam victim on a dumb would-be scam artist.

Briefly, the intended victim had listed a G4 Powerbook for sale on eBay. He was contacted by the scammer who had set up a fake escrow site to lull the victim into a false sense of confidence to get the laptop sent to him for free.

Little did he know, the "victim" was onto him and a complex scam the scammer soap opera played itself out over two continents with hundreds of onlookers following and paricipating via an online message board.



Soooo satisfying!

Spam Volume Down

Has anyone else noticed that the volume of spam pouring into their inbox has dropped by more than half over the last few days?

Not that I'm complaining...

I just wonder why. Are the spammers taking a break?

Huge Spam Bust

Great news!

The world's biggest spammer has been named by the US FTC. It is alleged that the New Zealander, Lance Atkinson, 26, living in Pelican Waters, Queensland, Australia is the ringleader of a massive global spam operation responsible for sending out billions of spam emails over a number of years.
It is believed the operation was behind up to one third of all spam on the Internet.

Read the full story from The Age here.

Breaking news

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: daryl
Date: 2008/8/4
Subject: Breaking news
To: xxx



Worst characteristics of Americans
http://duka-coaching.dk/index1.html

Fake news spam

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Olena
Date: 2008/8/4
Subject: Popular news
To: xxx

Microsoft has paid Facebook $1 billion to get access to their database http://nazarenobogota.com/index1.html

Good News! Scammers busted.

This story from a South African news site is great news in the fight against scams and scam related spam

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20080708055909629C151283

Not that I'm complaining...

The past few days have seen a remarkable decline in the amount of spam I receive in my inbox daily. I wonder if it's just me, or have most other people been enjoying this spam holiday?

I also wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that three undersea cables have been cut in the Mediterranean Sea, thus reducing internet traffic to and from the Middle East and India.

Could it be that the spammers have been cut off by this? Just a thought.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2153974.htm