eries/comments such as “How are you?” or “I miss you!” so you’d think the email originated with a friend.

Then they cranked up their efforts: emails with your name as the sender (? Who in the hell would email themselves a notification for a bounced email?); mailer daemon pseudonyms; officious looking accoun

Christmas is here: for those of us with any sense of ethics, this typically means good food, good friends, good music, lots of awe-inspiring lights. But for the greedy, unethical, opportunistic folks—those who behave malevolently year round—it means coming up with more ways to phish, to look for and rip off unsuspecting consumers or Internet users. Be the big fish they don’t catch….

SPAM IN YOUR HOME

You have seen the layers of possibility in your spam (or bulk) mail box, even if you have never used a credit card online or visited (out of curiosity, of course) an x-rated site:

Enlarge something (even if you don’t own that particular piece of genital equipment)

Fall for something (I’m sure all of us have invested in offshore illnesses, so we could get that billion-dollar checque)

Buy something (pills, hair, housing developments, clinics, dead animals, cow patties)

NEW LURES

And the spammers are getting more advanced, though not smarter—as they clearly can’t spell or use grammar with much facility, for starters. They started pulling fast ones by using as return addresses those names you had recently used in your online activities. Then they screwed with the subject line, with your name and intimate queries/comments such as “How are you?” or “I miss you!” so you’d think the email originated with a friend.

Then they cranked up their efforts: emails with your name as the sender (? Who in the hell would email themselves a notification for a bounced email?); mailer daemon pseudonyms; officious looking accoun

ecting consumers or Internet users. Be the big fish they don’t catch….

SPAM IN YOUR HOME

You have seen the layers of possibility in your spam (or bulk) mail box, even if you have never used a credit card online or visited (out of curiosity, of course) an x-rated site:

Enlarge something (even if you don’t own that particular piece of genital equipment)

Fall for something (I’m sure all of us have invested in offshore illnesses, so we could get that billion-dollar checque)

Buy something (pills, hair, housing developments, clinics, dead animals, cow patties)

NEW LURES

And the spammers are getting more advanced, though not smarter—as they clearly can’t spell or use grammar with much facility, for starters. They started pulling fast ones by using as return addresses those names you had recently used in your online activities. Then they screwed with the subject line, with your name and intimate queries/comments such as “How are you?” or “I miss you!” so you’d think the email originated with a friend.

Then they cranked up their efforts: emails with your name as the sender (? Who in the hell would email themselves a notification for a bounced email?); mailer daemon pseudonyms; officious looking accoun

ou don’t own that particular piece of genital equipment)

Fall for something (I’m sure all of us have invested in offshore illnesses, so we could get that billion-dollar checque)

Buy something (pills, hair, housing developments, clinics, dead animals, cow patties)

NEW LURES

And the spammers are getting more advanced, though not smarter—as they clearly can’t spell or use grammar with much facility, for starters. They started pulling fast ones by using as return addresses those names you had recently used in your online activities. Then they screwed with the subject line, with your name and intimate queries/comments such as “How are you?” or “I miss you!” so you’d think the email originated with a friend.

Then they cranked up their efforts: emails with your name as the sender (? Who in the hell would email themselves a notification for a bounced email?); mailer daemon pseudonyms; officious looking accoun

re getting more advanced, though not smarter—as they clearly can’t spell or use grammar with much facility, for starters. They started pulling fast ones by using as return addresses those names you had recently used in your online activities. Then they screwed with the subject line, with your name and intimate queries/comments such as “How are you?” or “I miss you!” so you’d think the email originated with a friend.

Then they cranked up their efforts: emails with your name as the sender (? Who in the hell would email themselves a notification for a bounced email?); mailer daemon pseudonyms; officious looking accoun

eries/comments such as “How are you?” or “I miss you!” so you’d think the email originated with a friend.

Then they cranked up their efforts: emails with your name as the sender (? Who in the hell would email themselves a notification for a bounced email?); mailer daemon pseudonyms; officious looking account # or order # subjects flooded your box—as if you had spent a lot of money and time signing up for and ordering massive amounts of product, you rich and busy thing, you!

They started getting coo-coo with the sender names (IPFreely, Biteme, Flossibel and Spot--names I will do an article on later) and lazy (or stupid) with the subject lines: defraud finders. What in hell does this mean? Are the spammers ESOL (English speakers of other languages), bastardizing word usage—verbs, nouns, etc., insulting our sensibilities to the point where we would not buy from such an unprofessional company even if it were legit? Are they selling us a defrauding kit that will be useful for only one type of villain, the type they are but pretend not to be?

PROFESSIONAL PHISHERMEN and -WOMEN

The most obvious (but hard to catch and easy to be fooled by) spammers are called phishers, greedy, felonious pigs who simulate a legitimate company, writing you with a threat--under the guise that your privacy, money, and/or identity are at stake…when in fact they are the predators about whom they warn us. In just a few hours, you might receive each of the following variations (scams), each more conspicuous and more tendentious (to suck you in if they misse