Kelsey Brooke Jones is missing here is her picture forward this to everyone you know so she might be found; same for Krystava Patients Schmidt.If you forward this email to 10 of your friends, Dave Matthews, the famous rock star philanthropist will make a contribution to help sick and dying kids
Craig Shergold is dying of cancer and wants to get in the Guinness Book of World Records send him baseball cards, caps, business cards
The Post Office is asking congress for a 5-cent tax on email; write your congressman immediately and ask him to oppose bill 602P
"My pregnant girlfriend says that she will have an abortion unless she gets at least 500 emails asking her not to, so please save my unborn child!"
The Post Office is discontinuing "Black Heritage" postage stamps and is going to destroy all inventory, and also "Black Voting Rights to Expire in 2007."
The U.S. Government is going to charge us "long distance toll charges" for Internet access - write your congressmen now before it's too late!
A petition started by the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair is calling for the end of religious broadcasting
Canola oil is hazardous to your health The Klingerman Virus will kill your computer and Microsoft said on CNN that there is no defense or cure for it there are AIDS infected needles in movie theater seats, pay phone coin slots, restaurant playgrounds, and in soft drink machines
Gerber is giving away $500 savings bonds to each child under the age of 12 as part of a legal settlement Intel and AOL will pay your for forwarding this email a major fried chicken franchise uses mutant chickens - that is why the word "chicken" is no longer in their name Neiman Marcus charges $250 for its cookie recipe 60 Minutes reported that Proctor and Gamble is a satanic company
Some guy woke up in a motel room with a pain in his side and his kidney was stolen at night do not flash you headlights at an oncoming car without headlights - it is a gang initiation rite to kill whomever flashes their headlights
AOL, Intel, Microsoft, Bath and Body Works, The Gap, Cracker Barrel, Time Warner, Honda, Old Navy, Outback, Victoria's Secret, and a host of other well known businesses are now using a sophisticated email tracker; if you forward "this" email to 10 or 100 of your friends they will give you a new car, $1000, a gift certificate, or some other valuable prize.
Don't buy bananas, because they are infected with a flesh eating disease some radical group has put LSD on pay phone buttons O'Hare airport is covering up that five travelers were killed by poisonous spiders in the restrooms there
ALL of the above are FALSE, but millions of email users regularly forward these and dozens of other hoaxes and urban legends, believing that they are doing the right thing by helping to find lost kids, save a dying child, warning their friends of lethal hazards, or trying to get something for nothing by forwarding emails (there is no such thing as an email tracker which reports who forwarded emails and how many). This may seem innocent, and possibly even fun, but there may also be a substantial downside of passing on these hoaxes and urban legends. The most obvious is tying up the limited bandwidth available to us; remember that many internet users do not have unlimited access, and pay by the hour or "bits" for access, and these wasted emails may cost the recipient money. Some pundits also allege that up to 10% of all Internet email traffic is wasted with this bogus information. Even worse, is that it is documented that what was an urban legend may become reality as a self fulfilling prophecy by giving copy-cat miscreants an idea that they would not likely have thought of themselves. This has indeed happened in a few cases.
Secondarily, these hoaxes also tend to dilute the impact and credibility of the few warnings that are legitimate, as the reader cannot quickly separate truth from the more common fiction.
It is also amusing to me that the entertainment industry sometimes takes these urban legends and creates a feature using them, which gives creditability to the falsehoods. NBC's fictional "Law and Order" has had the kidney theft case, as an example; there have been many others as well. In the opposite direction, some TV fiction has been accepted as fact, and then becomes part of the email folklore.
Forwarding urban legends may also be very embarrassing. I routinely get emails from listeners to my weekly radio show (KLVI 560AM, Tuesdays 6-7pm), and now from this column (iwilsker@ih2000.net) asking me to announce these warnings on the air, or to publish them in the paper. Frequently, the prefix to these is to the effect that "my manager sent this to me and he knows better than to fall for hoaxes" or "our company computer (or security) expert has posted this warning, and he would not send it if it wasn't true" or "my son who is a police officer (or doctor or lawyer or other professional) sent this to me, and he is too smart to fall for anything". When I respond that the message is indeed a hoax, and include significant documentation to that effect, I sometimes get a nasty phone call or email from the sender or their "expert" that I embarrassed HIM by making him look foolish.
A typical hint that an email may likely be a hoax is a statement that gives it a degree of credibility citing a major media source or a big name company (typically Microsoft, AOL, or IBM) as the source. This, along with the ubiquitous "forward this to everyone in your address book" should give the reader a strong warning that message is a hoax. Some hoaxes even mix a grain of truth with an exaggeration to gain believability. The "#90 phone warning" (someone will call you claiming they are from the phone company testing your line, and ask you to press #90 on your phone, and then they making long distance calls on your line) is an example of this.
Please, before forwarding anything of this nature, use responsible email etiquette, and check the messages out first. This may save you much embarrassment. One of my personal favorites is http://urbanlegends.about.com. This site, updated almost daily, determines the facts, lists the most common hoaxes and urban legends currently in circulation, has a search function, and provides links to many other related sites. Another similar site is http://www.truthorfiction.com that also has a comprehensive list of hoaxes, and an easy to use search engine. While these sites also include virus hoax information, I typically use McAfee's http://vil.mcafee.com/hoax.asp or Norton's http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html to verify any virus information that I get forwarded to me. Whenever I announce or forward a warning, I include at least one link from a reputable source documenting the accuracy of the statement. One warning; mainstream media sources such as the TV networks and press services have fallen victim to these hoaxes themselves, so I verify the information from an independent source, rather than just relying on the media.
According to the email filtering service Brightmail, http://www.brightmail.com, spam is clogging the Internet. Chances are that if you use email, and do not use a filtering service, that approximately 10% of the email that you receive falls in the category of spam. This load has clogged servers, slowed internet connections, cost internet service providers and recipients untold millions of dollars (but is nearly free to the sender), and has evolved into what may be one of the major sources of fraud on the net.
Brightmail's "Spamometer" at http://www.brightmail.com/spam/spamometer.shtml regularly tracks the amount of spam on the net, and the types of spam. For example, during the week of March 5-11 (the most current statistics available as I write this) there were approximately 84,000 different spam messages sent across the net - this number might sound surprisingly small, but these are different messages - a spammer who sent out a million identical spams only counts as one spam, and there were 84,000 different spams sent that week!
Spam falls into different categories that would not surprise any regular email user. Again according to Brightmail, during the week of March 5-11, the largest number of spams was "product" related at 38%. These are for miracle weight loss products, a variety of sexual enhancements, toner cartridges and inkjets, travel deals, adult websites, online casinos, software, and other products. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people fall for these deals, especially when the risk of fraud or loss is extremely high. Many of these spammers offer online "digital checking" where instead of asking for your credit card information, they ask for the routing and account numbers on your checking account so that the spammer can draft payment directly from your account! While not illegal, this practice scares me. First, because it is only a matter of trust that the spammer will remove enough money from your checking account to cover the transaction, and not the balance of your checking account. Of course, once someone has all of your checking information, we all know that they would never raid your account, right? With a credit card (not a debit card), the law limits your loss under most circumstances to $50, but I am unaware of any law that limits your liability from unauthorized or excessive drafts from your checking, and with your checking account, the money is simply gone, whereas with a credit card there is typically time to question a charge. Many of these spammers are using Chinese, Korean, Russian, or eastern European mail servers, which makes investigations nearly impossible. It should also be noted that anecdotal evidence is that much of the software bargains offered via spam are counterfeit or pirated, if they are ever delivered at all. Secondarily, I also would not trust any company that uses forged email addresses or headers, and has false "remove" instructions at the bottom of the email. If a spammer is going to lie about who he is, the why should I trust him for making good on my orders?
The second most common type of spam was "financial" spam, accounting for 32% of the different spams. Chances are you have received multiple copies of get rich quick schemes; hot tips on thinly traded OTCBB stocks (over the counter - bulletin board listed stocks are among the riskiest investments available, and sometimes used in stock manipulation frauds), which is referred to in the financial community as "touting trash"; chain letters; and other similar schemes absolutely guaranteed to make you rich quickly. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is not. Despite claims to the contrary, the majority (if not all) of the chain letters are likely illegal. Many try to make themselves look legal by citing resources such as the Small Business Administration (SBA), or links to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), or even the postal inspector. These are just classical traps to imply legitimacy when legitimacy is lacking. Another type of financial spam is the classical "Nigerian Money Laundering Scam" asking for a transfer of funds to help close a Nigerian deal, in exchange for a huge return on your money. This is referred to as a "419" scam, and is well documented as a fraud. Do NOT fall for them!
The remaining 30% of spam falls into six other categories such as personal, political, spiritual or "other" types. During the recent November elections, the incidence of political spam was heavy, but now it is near zero. Much of the political spam was wild claims typically "negative", opposed to a candidate, citing sources in the mainstream media, but in reality was the "big lie" and are now listed as hoaxes and urban legends. The small amount of political spam today concerns Palestinian issues, the "Clinton Dead", the Second Amendment, Chinese espionage, and the classical Trilateral Commission and New World Order conspiracies. "Personal" spam is people allegedly looking for jobs or social contacts. Spiritual spams are the prayer requests asking for you to forward to everyone in your address book; these are often also urban legends.
Now that you are aware of the degree of spam, what can be done about it, to reduce the amount you receive. One good choice is filtered email. Many email providers offer filtering, typically forwarding bulk email into a special folder, or not forwarding it at all. This is sometimes not a good choice, because non-spam is occasionally filtered out as well. For those that are using most of the major ISPs, only a few of which filter email, there are free services such as the Brightmail discussed above (Brightmail is however currently closed to new "free" accounts, but is accepting ISPs and corporate accounts). A quick search on Yahoo for "email filtering" produced several other email filtering services and software products.
I like doing more than just deleting spam, I like to fight back. My personal favorite, available in both free and fee forms, is SpamCop at http://spamcop.net. SpamCop in either form is just great, in that it quickly and accurately identifies the true sender of spam, despite forged headers and emails, routes your complaint to the proper individuals, and works to kill spam at its source. The paid version offers the additional service of very strict email filtering of your existing email account (about 50cents per megabyte of email, or about $12.50 per year for the average user), and a spam free email address (mine is ira@spamcop.net). I get a lot of spam on my regular email accounts, and by choice I actually enjoy reporting spam. It is personally rewarding to me to get an email from an ISP or web host that they have closed the account of the spammer for violating their "terms of service". I realize that the spammer is likely to repeat the offense elsewhere, but at least this makes their lives more difficult, and results in the reduction of the number of victims.
One last tip; when you receive a spam that has "remove" instructions on the bottom, the rule is do not follow those "remove" instructions! Two reasons; first, if you reply to the remove, then the spammer now has a confirmed email address, which is more valuable to sell to other spammers. Second, the majority of time the spammer uses a forged email address in both their "reply to" and "remove" addresses. In this case your email simply bounces. In a few cases, the spammer is outright nasty by using someone else's real email address, flooding that innocent victim with nasty messages from the irritated recipients of spam.
I am not a fan of censorship or "big brother", but something needs to be done about the quantity and persistent frauds common in spam. There are bills in congress relating to spam, but would likely be ineffective. One bill I like is to require real email "reply-to" addresses, and meaningful "remove" or "opt-out" services, but while these proposed laws "feel good", they may prove somewhat ineffectual as much of the current spam is from overseas sources, and near impossible to police.
Ira Wilsker is an Instructor IV of Management Development at Lamar Institute of Technology. Ira has been working with computers since 1965 when he took his first computer class at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago. A past president of the Golden Triangle PC Club, and a board member of the Association of PC Users Groups, Ira is a frequent guest on the local television news, and has lectured locally to internationally on a variety of computer topics ranging from computer and Internet basics, to CyberCrime, and Community Oriented Policing. Ira is the host of the Computer Information Hour on KLVI 560AM every Tuesday, 6-7pm.
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