Posted on 07/26/2004 1:17:35 PM PDT by Graybeard58
Hard to believe that even one person in 40,000 would respond. Of course there are a lot of democrats in the world.
I'm surprised it's that high.
I'd have guessed 1 in 10,000 or lower.
I wonder what the hit rate is for the Nigerian scammers. They've taken in Harvard Professors and other "smart" people (can you believe that they get to cast votes too?).
The old line has never been more true: You can't cheat an honest man.
There are a lot of subject lines like:
Re: overdue payment
I've been trying to get you on the phone
Hey, we talked last week
ALL of these are illegal come ons as they use deceptive trade practices.
I also recently got one (purportedly from ebay):
Your eBay account has been suspended
(inside it says how some suspicious activity has been noticed on your account and so it "has" been frozen pending further communication...).
Just as there is a "postal inspector", someone in the Federal Trade Commission should be positioned over email fraud complaints. It is ILLEGAL to send porn ads to minors, period. In the postal realm, it is illegal to send porn ads to someone who has not approved such mail.
This is technically fraud over wires (phones/telegraph/etc.) and does fall under government oversight.
There has been no will to do anything about this issue for 20 years. The telemarketers lobby congress well.
I have been receiving a lot of spam with gibberish in the leading paragraphs. Just nonsense words strung together. This has been happening for several months. It may be spam for insurance or mortgage or even pharmacy products. What is this all about? Anyone have any info?
The gibberish is to get it past your spam filters.
The strung together jibberish is a way to foil spam filters. Fortunately we can customize our spam filters on our mail server to get rid of it...
Basically, messages with a lot of random words in the body content are designed to fool spam filters by containing terms that make them appear to be legitimate.
As filtering becomes more sophisticated, so do the spammers.
Unfortunately.
FReeper Rule!
DUers Drool.
I'm a DUer.
If you have HTML rendering turned off, you will see the gibberish.
You should have HTML rendering turned off. Otherwise the HTML could exploit a security vulnerability in your email program and access your system. At the very least, it could have you downloading content from a page you did not wish to hit.
If you turn off HTML rendering, the HTML will be delivered as an attachment. If you really need to read it (sent from someone who formats their outgoing email in HTML) you can always read it when disconnected from the internet. That way there is no possibility it will hit a Web page without your permission.
If you have the option, you should format your outgoing mail in plain text rather than HTML so others can read your email with HTML rendering turned off.
Just my $.02.
Shalom.
Did you mean 1 in 100,000?
I reported them to the FBI.
--Boris
In many cases, the URL will also contain encoded information to tell the spammer that your email address is "live" (i.e., someone is reading it and doesn't have a particularly good spam filter).
MailWasher: Good for pre-screening & bouncing SPAM
How did i get infected in the first place?
Earthlink aware of this and now is adding a scam protector as well as a spam protector to their website offerings.
I've noticed alot of that too and was wondering the same thing. I've been getting alot of phishing emails claiming to be from e-bay or paypal. Just remember, no matter how real it looks, if they ask you to click there link to log in it's a fraud.
I got one from Citi Bank last week asking me to verify my credit card info. The scary part is how did they know I have a Citi Bank credit card?
Nope.
I'd really have figured it would be around 1 in ten thousand.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.