What to Do About Harassing Emails

For most of us, email has become such an ingrained part of our lives, it is hard to imagine life without it. If you work from a computer terminal, you likely send dozens of emails a day, hundreds a week and thousands per year, but for every email you send, you likely get several unwanted emails in return. This unwanted email is known as spam, and it is one of the biggest headaches of the Internet age.

Different email programs try to deal with the scourge of spam in different ways. Some try spam blocking software that is supposed to weed out the unwanted mail from the ones that you need, but more times than not, this software ends up sending important notices into the garbage. Other programs attempt to compile master lists of spam email addresses in hopes of screening out unwanted mail, but new addresses are made so quickly, this process is simply not comprehensive enough.

As most experienced email users can tell you, the only way to really deal with this problem is to contact each spam sender personally and have your account removed from their lists. The only problem is that many of these spammers don't want to be contacted, and simply hitting the reply button won't cut it. You need to know the company name behind the spam so that you can contact them directly and end their assault on your inbox.

Working Proxies and Why Free Proxies Break

If you want to obscure your identity and IP address from a particular web site you visit, then you'll need to find some reliable working proxies. there are lots of reasons people use proxies they are surprisingly useful servers and have all sorts of cool uses.

The main difficulty with free working proxies is because generally the administrators of these servers don't even know their server is being used as proxy server. Often these boxes are just misconfigured internet facing servers which have been left open by mistake. It doesn't take long for people to find them and they start getting added to the endless lists of free anonymous proxies on the internet.

It doesn't usually take long before they are completely overwhelmed with surfers bouncing off these proxies and browsing via them becomes a painfully slow process until they either fall over or an embarrassed systems admin realises his mistake. But never fear there will always be a new batch of proxies along very soon.

Whatever your use for using a proxy server, whether you want to bypass your work or schools proxy to access restricted sites or just you believe in privacy and freedom of speech. You should be extremely careful what you use these servers for - many, many free anonymous proxies are set up for the purposes of identity theft and stealing data. When you use a proxy all your web browsing goes through that single point first and as most html traffic is in clear text then obviously identity thieves, hackers and all sorts of spyware is usually found or installed on them.

Unless you know all about who runs a particular free proxy server, then never, ever use it to pass any sort of personal or private information. Personally I would never go near a free anonymous proxy partly because I know exactly the sort of people who target these servers to steal information.

If your goal of protecting your identity and privacy on the internet then a free anonymous proxy is about the worst thing you could use. Sure it will likely block your IP address from the web server you are visiting (if it's configured correctly) but all your data is in the clear before that point and your ISP has a complete list of every server you are visiting anyway (unless you use end-to-end encryption). That's before you include the distinct possibility of Mr Identity Thief sitting on that proxy server with a sniffer capturing every single piece of data both ways!

Free anonymous proxies are extremely costly to run and less face it you never get anything for free. If you want real privacy, real anonymity and to surf at super fast speeds you are either going to have to seduce a systems admin at your local University or use a paid service.

Elements of Some 419 Scams

Internet-savvy 419 men routinely use emails to source out and target their victims. The availability of email-harvesting software has rapidly turned this local scamming business into one of the biggest industries spanning the world. From the Americas to Europe and even to Asia and Australia, these 419 scammers send out their standard deceiving emails to a mailing list they gathered online.

Bearing their standard, albeit fake information and their scam stories, they send out these emails from internet cafes to hide their identities. They mass-send the emails although recipients would be inclined to think it was sent only to them.

The 419 scams have several elements. It would be wise for you to have a look and see at them and be guided accordingly.

Fake Checks. Scammers usually use fake checks when necessary to falsely gain the trust and confidence of victims. This scheme often takes advantage of the float. The float is that period of time it takes for a check to clear. While the float may take anywhere from 7-10 days for local clearing checks, it could sometimes take months especially when dealing with foreign banks. As is the common practice in the US and in some other countries, banks are to make funds available to the depositor in at most five banking days whether or not the clearing process has been completed. It could take anywhere from three days to several months for the fraud to be discovered.

Untraceable Communication Lines. Scammers usually communicate anonymously, almost untraceable, so it would be difficult to track them down. Watch out for:
• Web-based email accounts. Many free webmail services do not require valid information to identify registrations requests. Such webmails are often used as they can be setup in minutes and can be accessed in internet cafes.

• Email hijacking. Scammers email family, friends and even associates of the legitimate account holder to defraud them. They pose as a friend needing assistance, sending emails from a familiar account. They normally steal login information typically by phishing viruses.

Fake Websites. Email-based scammers wishing to enhance their "credibility" use fake websites. These websites may imitate real ones like PayPal, eBay and baking websites. Imitating websites is normally done for phishing. But since their goal is to entice the victims to make money transfers through legitimate means, they could create a totally fake website for a fictitious bank to suit their purposes.

Invitation to visit. Some victims get invites to visit a country and allegedly meet with real or pretend government officials. Victims who fall for this trick are held for ransom. In some cases, they're smuggled into the country and threatened to giving up more cash for the penalties of being in the country without official documents. Some victims wind up dead when the ransom is not met.

There are other elements in this business that people must know. But the most important thing to remember is to not be too trusting. It's human to want to be wealthy but it's always good to remember there's no shortcut to it. If it sounds too good to be true, then it must be too good to be true.

Email Spam Scams and Variations of 419 Scams

With the horrific stories of successful scammers making millions from fraudulent activities online, efforts are now in full force to crack down the 419 scammers. An ABC documentary on the subject traced a scam to its origins in Nigeria.

The ABC documentary was just one of many efforts, now getting more concerted, to crack down on the fraudsters perpetuating this activity on a massive scale. The Nigerian police has created the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), a special division specifically to enforce the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code, 419. The code makes it illegal to obtain money by false pretenses. It was not enforced until recently.

The scams happen worldwide. The old, traditional post mail scams have now escalated to million-dollar, worldwide fraud business because of the availability and accessibility of internet facilities. What authorities find out though, is that a lot of these scammers are not part of an organization. While there may be highly organized master scammers, many are small scale schemes looking to make an easy buck.

A lot of the scams have been traced back to parts of Western Africa. Nigeria is a hot spot. The decline in Nigeria's oil-drive economy has left millions desperately poor. But instead of looking for decent jobs, thousands of computer-savvy Nigerians are making a living off of thousands of gullible people from the West, many of whom are Americans.

Spam emails are the most widely used method of fraud. Spammers send varied types of fraudulent emails. It begins with the use of email extraction programs that scour internet websites for email addresses. In some instances, fraudsters obtain a list of email addresses from the black market.

The scammer would usually pose as a widow or heir of a corrupt government official who has left his family with embezzled money stashed away in some hidden account. The widow would ask help to get their money on the funds and in exchange, promise millions of dollars in reward money.

Sometimes, a scammer will pose as a diplomat or a corrupt government official looking to make for a partner-investor in a business. The proposal is usually to ask help to funnel dirty money and "cleanse" it. The money is supposedly stashed somewhere inaccessible. If one helps release the funds that would require advancing a small sum of money, the victim will supposedly receive a million-dollar reward and business deal.

Scammers will sometimes notify a victim of winning a lottery online. The amounts would be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars purportedly held in trust somewhere pending your accomplishment of some paper work. Typically, the victim will be asked to pay a small sum to cover facilitation and processing fees before the money could be released.

Some scammers will identify themselves as a bank officer knowing of a deceased depositor who has died without a next of kin. He would ask the victim to help them get the funds before others do by posing as next of kin and filing a claim. The victim will then be promised a commission, a reward for the help.

More recent forms now involve romance angles and a lot of them now operate in dating sites and online communities. They pose as desperate women wanting to fall in love and scam lonely, gullible men for cash.

Anonymous Proxy Lists - A Warning

Nobody likes being snooped on but nowadays there are too many people online doing just that, from governments to identity thieves - lots of people with their own agendas trying to spy on what we do online. This is why so many people look for anonymous proxy lists, thinking that if they just change the proxy setting in their browser that will give them some protection from all people invading their privacy.

Unfortunately it is not quite that simple and let me explain why. An anonymous proxy will protect a little bit of your browsing online, what it effectively does is stop your IP address being logged on the web server you visit. The only address left there would be that of the proxy server, which would make all your requests for you.

Of course this only stops one little part of the trail on the internet, the most comprehensive sits with your ISP which is why the governments of Europe have decided to enforce them to keep their logs for two years. So that's every web site, email and chat session linked to your account and kept to be accessed by whoever. All this information can also be picked up along the wire or via any wireless connection you use if it's not secured. For instance anyone who logs on to a computer network in a hotel would be very surprised to see the information available to anyone who starts a network sniffer. You can learn an awful lot about your fellow guests in a very short space of time!

The anonymous proxy of course will also have a record of ALL your web traffic and what you do online. Here lies one of the main problems with using free anonymous proxies, the simple fact that instead of leaving your IP address on various web servers across the internet, it's all logged on one specific server. Given that these servers are usually just misconfigured internet facing servers they are an obvious target for another internet snooper called the identity thief. All they have to do is log-on on to the server and install a simple sniffer and they will capture all the clear text traffic travelling across the wire, extremely valuable information in their line of work.

Using anonymous proxies which you don't know about is extremely risky, it has been estimated that about 80% of them have spyware infections. But simple stuff like that would be the least of your worries if you happened across one of the faster free anonymous proxies that often appear in the lists, if they are really quick it could be one of the servers set up by one of the many hacker groups across the world who buy and sell personal information.

Protecting your privacy is a good thing just be careful how you go about it. Think, anonymous proxies cost a lots of money to run. Who is paying and why are they doing for free? Read those free anonymous proxy lists with care and be careful how you surf.