I received this in Hotmail this morning. Is there no end to the type of scam people perpertrate (or attempt to)? I mean, really, how stupid do they think we are?
Note: I have XXXed out some figures
The National Lottery P O Box here County here UNITED KINGDOM (Customer Services)
Ref: UK/XXXX/XXX Batch: XXXX
WINNING NOTIFICATION: We happily announce to you the draw (#963) of the UK NATIONAL LOTTERY, online Sweepstakes International program held on Saturday 14th Jan, 2006. Your e-mail address attached to ticket number: XXX with Serial number XXX drew the lucky numbers: 03-07-09-21-35-39 (bonus no.32), which subsequently won you the lottery in the 2nd category i.e match 5 plus bonus.
You have therefore been approved to claim a total sum of £1500.000.00 (one million five hundred thousand pounds only) in cash credited to file XXX This is from a total cash prize of £6.000.000.00 shared amongst the(4)lucky winners in this category i.e Match 5 plus bonus. All participants for the online version were selected randomly from World Wide Web sites through computer draw system and extracted from over 100,000 unions, associations, and corporate bodies that are listed online. This promotion takes place weekly.
Please note that your lucky winning number falls within our European booklet representative office in Europe as indicated in your play coupon. In view of this, your £1.500.000.00 (one million five hundred thousand pounds only) will be released to you by any of our payment offices in Europe. Our European agent will immediately commence the process to facilitate the release of your funds as soon as you contact him. For security reasons, you are advised to keep your winning information confidential till your claim is processed and your money remitted to you in whatever manner you deem fit to claim your prize. This is part of our precautionary measure to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program. Please be warned. To file for your claim, please contact our fiduciary agent: Mr James Anderson (e-mail address went here)
The really pathetic thing is that people still believe this garbage. I heard some people complaining on talk radio about a week ago (I was in a waiting room that had a talk radio station on - I never listen to it myself) saying that they had given their bank account numbers out to similar email requests and had some money stolen.
As Simpson would say...Doh!
What really bugged me about these morons was that they wanted the government to give them their money back. Why the heck should I pay for their stupidity through my taxes. Good grief
Cheers, BSquared There's more to politics than left and right...find out where you sit on the polical compass by taking the world's smallest political quiz at http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html
Gee Paula... are you going to give him your details? ROFLMTO! I am getting SPAM to my iprimus email account and it is supposedly from the National Bank and then Westpac Bank. I received as many as 100 emails in 5 days from the supposed Westpac Bank. I forwarded the email on to the Real Westpac Bank and they were able to take action. The emails from both banks requested I update my bank details. Funnily enough I am not with either banks so knew right off the bat this was a scam. The banks tell us don't ever EVER go to a website that requests you update your account details online. They don't operate that way.
Heard a story, might not even be real, about a bloke contacting these people, stringing them along and managed to get them to pay him the transaction fee.
The techos I work with all say that you should have at least two email accounts
One you use for when you need to give your email address to an unknown third party (websites, subscriptions etc) - your public account
One you NEVER put on the internet anywhere (use for friends or secure transactions only) - your private account
The reason is that as soon as you type your email address into an open internet site it will eventually get picked up by a spam crawler - even if the site doesn't sell its email lists there are software products that will crawl the entire internet looking for something@something strings and when they find one they send an email and see if it gets validated (via not getting rejected). Once your email address has been validated it will simply be transferred and/or sold to any company looking to send spam - therefore the number of spam emails you receive will grow exponentially
So...you have your "public" email account for that stuff and when the spam gets too much you simply change addresses.
I have been doing this for a while...am on my second "public" email account (the first one lasted about a year before the spam got too heavy).
Cheers, BSquared There's more to politics than left and right...find out where you sit on the polical compass by taking the world's smallest political quiz at http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html
Cheers, BSquared There's more to politics than left and right...find out where you sit on the polical compass by taking the world's smallest political quiz at http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html
Very possibly meandean..if they can be bothered doing the coding.
I just have to wonder how much return there is for spammers. I guess it's a low cost business but surely there aren't too many morons left who respond to it.
I've certainly never met a bloke who would trust his most prized appendage to a "doctor" he learned of through a spam message (have had a flurry of appendage enlargement pills and surgery spams lately)
Cheers, BSquared There's more to politics than left and right...find out where you sit on the polical compass by taking the world's smallest political quiz at http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html
Same here BSquared! Not a man in sight and here I am receiving this to my Primary email account. I have 3 email accounts and use my Hotmail account for rubbish but somehow they have got hold of my Primary account. I just delete them and ignore them. Although I think it's funny that they can give you 'inches of growth' and men are not flocking to buy the stuff, go figure. Could it be it's a SCAM
Begg-Smith dogged by pop-ups By Robert Lusetich in Vancouver March 04, 2006
IT was as a precocious 12-year-old that Dale Begg-Smith came to realise the money-making promise of the fledgling internet. The talented kid was often photographed performing jaw-dropping moves on the slopes at Canada's Whistler ski resort, where the Begg-Smith clan moved from their Swiss Family Robinson existence on a remote island so Dale and older brother Jason could chase their dream of Olympic gold.
The perk from these photographic sessions was free ski gear.
Where others would have kept the gear, the prodigy taught himself to build a website, launched thinairsports.com and began flogging the skis, stocks, jackets and pants over the internet. "He was a smart, entrepreneurial kid who realised he could make money off the internet even back then," says Andrew Forin, 23, one of Begg-Smith's closest friends. "He had no training, no experience, but here's what you've got to understand about Dale: he's the most amazing individual in this world, as far as I'm concerned. I know people say things like that and you go, 'yeah, whatever', but he was my best friend growing up and I'm telling you, there's no one like this kid."
He's right. But at a time when Australia's latest Olympic champion should be basking in gold medal glory, he is instead besieged by accusations he made his fortune through despised, and possibly illegal, internet programs and only took out Australian citizenship for political expediency.
Last month, the Canadian-born, Lamborghini-driving millionaire won the moguls gold at the Turin Winter Olympics for his adopted country of Australia. It was the nation's third ever winter gold and Begg-Smith was, appropriately, chosen to carry the Australian flag for the closing ceremony last weekend. But rather than focusing on his achievement, as the secretive Begg-Smith would have us, critics have homed in on the controversial source of his wealth.
His companies allegedly clog the internet with "spyware", a type of program that can redirect a computer to porn sites or install software that floods the computer with pop-up ads. At worse, spyware can steal confidential information such as usernames and passwords.
Begg-Smith's now defunct Adscpm.com website boasted that it generated 20 million pop-ups a day.
Begg-Smith's minders insist he's involved in "legitimate" businesses, which the skiier won't discuss publicly, but allegations about his activities have now been sent to crime-busting New York attorney-general Eliot Spitzer.
Spitzer has already won a massive spyware settlement against a Los Angeles-based firm called Intermix, which he accused of tricking millions of people into installing hidden programs on their computers. Begg-Smith could be next in his sights.
Forin, who is writing a book about his friend, says that like everything Begg-Smith puts his mind to, he quickly grasped the lay of the land of the online world. "It didn't take him long to learn that when you own an online store you have to market it because nobody knows about it if you don't," he says.
"It was all about exposure. He realised online advertising was the next step and he became very good at advertising online. He became so good at it he started offering his services (to other companies) when he was only 13 or 14 and started consulting."
By the time he was 15, his brother Jason, who is five years older, had joined the business and the money was rolling in.
Soon Begg-Smith, who barely attended high school, the boys received their education at home, had decisions to make. The Canadian Olympic bureaucracy makes heavy demands on the lives of its young skiers, demands an autonomous and impatient young man had no intention of following.
"I was making so much money ... I had to make a choice," he told the Vancouver Sun newspaper last year. "The choice at that time was business."
It would be a fateful decision and one that would land him in Australia, a move his one-time coach, Brett Wood, says was "political convenience" as Begg-Smith needed a country to represent to get to the World Cup and, eventually, the Olympics.
And as Begg-Smith himself has noted, Australian officials turned a blind eye to his extracurricular activities and allowed him the time to pursue them. "For the Australians, the No1 thing is results," he said. "Results speak higher than anything else."
It was a decision that also guaranteed him a significant cash flow, not the $40 million reported but potentially in the millions according to those who follow the workings of internet marketing, as well as a $360,000 Lamborghini and waterfront condo on Vancouver's exclusive Coal Harbour.
But it was also a path that now threatens to haunt the most evasive and mysterious of Olympic champions.
Steve Shubitz, a self-proclaimed geek who lives in San Diego, reckons Australia's newest gold medallist is, at best, unethical. Shubitz vehemently defends a person's right to surf the net without the threat of their computer being unwittingly hijacked. He and other "netizens" have spent the days since Begg-Smith's Turin triumph doing extensive detective work about the origins of his fortune.
The results, which contain damning allegations involving the grubby business of spyware, were sent to Spitzer after Begg-Smith indicated his company, which he's never named, had offices and staff in New York.
Shubitz tells The Weekend Australian he is sure "Begg-Smith and his brother made their money from distributing spyware to potentially millions of computer users because this sleazy world is extremely profitable if you have no ethics".
Spyware, or adware, is one of the biggest malaises on the net, so much so that the US Federal Trade Commission is considering forcing big-name advertisers to stop paying companies based on the number of hits they can generate on websites because it provides enormous financial motivation for spyware makers.
Begg-Smith has dodged questions about his online activities. But evidence, including a news release issued in 2002, reveals he was president of CPM Media and adsCPM, two companies which a host of internet security firms, including Symantec and Computer Associates, claim are purveyors of spyware.
One of these scams, called freescratchandwin.com, promised prizes but instead changed a computer's home and search pages, downloaded an array of pop-up ads and tracked a user's browsing habits. The registered owner of freescratchandwin is Jason Begg-Smith, who also represented Australia at Turin.
Several other domains linked to CPM Media and adsCPM, including adultexpressview and xzoomy, another notorious spyware site, were hosted by the same server.
"One of (the domains) even infects your computer and then has a pop-up advertising software to kill pop-ups," says Shubitz, "Which is like me breaking into your house and then selling you a burglar alarm."
Ben Edelman, an internet crusader at Harvard University, says of the Begg-Smith brothers: "It looks like they started with an advertising network and then graduated to distributing other people's spyware and then, the most objectionable thing is they started making their own spyware with programs."
None of the sites associated with Begg-Smith are currently operating. Begg-Smith's agent, David Melina, confirmed that his client was involved "as a consultant in the business" but would not name the company or discuss CPM Media or adsCPM.
"Dale's focused on skiing, his brother's more involved with the business than he is," Melina says. "Basically, Dale has very little involvement in the business now and prefers not to comment on it.
"He has been involved in a legitimate business and I don't know that spyware's an accurate description of that business.
"He's done nothing illegal. I think the public just wants to focus on his achievements. We'd like to think he's someone we just should be proud of."
Shubitz shakes his head at the idea. "I just wish he'd come out and admit what he did was wrong and apologise," he says. "Why do you think he doesn't want to go into detail about how he made all that money? Because he doesn't want to unlock the Pandora's Box. Well, guess what, it's opened anyway."
I absolutely detest pop ups, like the rest of the population.
I understand that google tracks what sites are visited when the bar is installed.
I have been getting Adobe Acrobat requesting me to update . but when you look closely at the box that appears to start the process, the Yahoo Toolbar is connected to the update whether you want it or not. Yahoo Toolbar is spyware too. So no updates for me right now.
And Begg-Smith only chose Australia to 'pursue' skiing because there would be less competition to get into the Olympic team. . (how lazy).
DEMOCRACY = Voters deciding by Poll on who will be the local member that "Big Business" will push around.
says who? Seriously, I prefer the whole cut/paste, saves me having to click the link and then read it. .
Cut and paste sure, fine, but I'm sure only a couple paragraphs are needed to show what's needed.
Says a copyright nut who wastes time reading signup pages.
"You also agree never to post any copyrighted material, which you do not expressly own the copyright to, or that you do not have the authorization to use."
Over the last 2 weeks I have been getting strange e-mails to my ISP account. Here is just one example. They appear to have been stopped by my ISP's firewall/anti-virus thinger plus my own anti-virus thinger.
Quoted Text
From: xxx@xxxx.xxx Sent: Sunday, 22 October 2006 3:42 PM To: x Subject: Mail server report.
Mail server report.
Our firewall determined the e-mails containing worm copies are being sent from your computer.
Nowadays it happens from many computers, because this is a new virus type (Network Worms).
Using the new bug in the Windows, these viruses infect the computer unnoticeably. After the penetrating into the computer the virus harvests all the e-mail addresses and sends the copies of itself to these e-mail addresses
Please install updates for worm elimination and your computer restoring.
Best regards, Customers support service
I then have a notice from my anti-virus thinger...
Quoted Text
Viruses found in the attached files. The file Update-KB6859-x86.zip: Virus identified I-Worm/Stration. The attachment was moved to the virus vault.
I get weird stuff at least 8 times per day. Here's a couple of examples:
SUBJECT: Don't know yet "byron it handicapper see em a spongy it austere it's marin it's clubroom or pasadena may impermeable but demarcate the conformance in divorce try bilge see cryptanalysis ! altitude not schemata it's bagel some flack on database on farmhouse ! dumb it ex , determine some segundo or baldy and degumming a butyrate , rachel may symbiosis may ghostly a alfred ! lien be aviatrix may rump be predominate and w not bedazzle it's d , distal the deneb but bleeker ! heterogeneity in bituminous but robinson in macaque see chairmen not dauphin the month it's mcginnis a sphalerite the codfish may alum !
blazon not ammonium or acquittal but seventieth or schultz ! chalmers it altar see remainder on architecture , ballast a grapevine ! peepy on conscious and excursion it's clockwork see delaware some chinook it's church on beg may deflector some polloi try synergy may propagate , smaller or befog not turbidity on"
WHAT THE HELL???
"Dear Sir/madam, take a look at our job offer. Our company-Glaube Investment Company looking for new partnership in Sweden! We looking for peoples from 21 old. Weekly salary in our company about 2500-4000 EUR. You need have its internet access, computer and 1-3 hours free time per day! You don`t need have higher education, special skills, and don`t need pay any money to start! regards, Holger Methe, director Glaube Investment Company!
to apply, e-mail: ************@aol.com "
"All the codes were cleared and the car ran flawlessly once again.At this point, only the radical third cam lobe actuated the valves for timing and lift often the greatest source of backpressure in an exhaust systemOn the drag racing front, Skunk2 has K-powered all-motor cars ripping the quarter mile in 9.85 seconds, while Papadakis is still taking his AEM RWD Pro Civic into record-setting territory I pan the screen in slow motion looking for a magical string pulling a scaled model or some cheesy video alteration to bolster my conclusion that Ueo's drift angle and speed isn't humanly They all just hung out, watching and yelling out commentsKelly Lynn, a blue-eyed squeeze fresh from Orlando Fla This 1.8-liter i-VTEC powerplant is the face of things to comeYou don't know me I love The Cure, Morrissey, Depeche ModeWhen the factory suspension is altered, the rear end tends to shift from left to right, causing the I want to get more into TV
Did you draw on past experience for advice? "
Truly, I have no idea what they are about and I delete them in my Outlook Express immediately. I get Trojan warnings and worm warnings a lot but my AVAST (free) virus scanner picks them all up. Sometimes I think someone doesn't like me also Paula. I still get at least 4 emails per day to that particular email account purporting they can make my 'you know what' inches bigger AND my girlfriend will love it!!
Paula, You should look into it . . I have seen a computer 'high-jacked' and used to send spam all over the world without the owner even knowing. Interpol got involved and he had to shut his PC down. It was a huge invconvenience. (your ISP will be able to help you)
The best policy is to NEVER reply to those spam emails. When you do, it confirms that yours is a bonafide addy. Spam will them keep on coming.
DEMOCRACY = Voters deciding by Poll on who will be the local member that "Big Business" will push around.
Hefty fine for spammer who sent 75m emails October 28, 2006 A Perth-based company has been fined $5.5 million for sending millions of unsolicited emails, with a judge labelling the spam annoying, costly to combat, and a threat to the internet.
It is the first time an Australian company has been fined under the the federal government's spam laws, introduced in April 2004.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) last year launched the Federal Court action against business seminar advertiser Clarity1 Pty Ltd and director Wayne Robert Mansfield.
It is believed Clarity1 clogged inboxes with as many as 75 million emails between April 2004 and April 2006.
Earlier this year, the court found Clarity1, which also trades as Business Seminars Australia and Maverick Partnership, had contravened the Spam Act 2003.
Federal Court Justice Robert Nicholson on Friday fined Clarity1 $4.5 million and Mr Mansfield $1 million for those contraventions.
Justice Nicholson said it was impossible to calculate the amount of loss or damage caused by the emails.
The spam would have resulted in "real loss or damage to the recipients ... in the form of direct financial costs associated with purchasing blocking and filtering software (and) other financial costs in the form of lost time and productivity ... " he said.
Justice Nicholson said he also accepted the emails had caused recipients "annoyance and frustration".
"Such loss or damage is therefore an aggravating factor to be take into account," he wrote in his reasons for the fine.
He said spam also posed a "threat to functionality of the internet".
The company has also been banned from sending any unsolicited emails. ACMA chairman Chris Chapman said the judgment provided a strong warning to Australian spammers.
Clarity1 and Mr Mansfield could not be reached for comment.
Is this a coincidence or what? Me thinks NOT! My email scanner picked up two emails a few minutes ago with Trojan Horses. My AVAST got them and stopped them but hey.... quit trying to stuff up my PC and email.
I have a suggestion for you all and not too many know about this little toy but I have used it for over 8 years now and it serves me well .
Rather than opening your mail client ( whatever it is) and subsequently downloading mail from your mail servers you can use this free software
What it allowes after you config all your options including the mail serves ( yes even web mail is supported yahoo, hotmail etc) you open your mail ONLY using this program first.
It will download the headers and (txt) of the mail on your server but doesn't download the mail. you can train and set options for spam after you have deleted the mail "from your server" and happy with the mail you are recieving then you open the program which inturn opens your mail and begins the downlod.
Paula, You should look into it . . I have seen a computer 'high-jacked' and used to send spam all over the world without the owner even knowing. Interpol got involved and he had to shut his PC down. It was a huge invconvenience. (your ISP will be able to help you)
The best policy is to NEVER reply to those spam emails. When you do, it confirms that yours is a bonafide addy. Spam will them keep on coming.
Oh I have looked into it, Gizmo and my computer is clean. I saved all the messages and have had a chat with my ISP and the authorities. I never reply.
Guess some off you don't know how spam mail is sent, to understand that its not a target to you directly. Spammers target a IP Range and as I have mentioned before that the top of the IP range is 255.255.255.255 .
Now taking that into account then you need to understand that for one spammer to send mail out to all of that is time consuming. So they target a block of IP#
So we follow this princible and we target 192.148.0.0-192.148.255.255 Everyone in that IP block with be hit with mail, however not all are connected its a hit or miss approach.
We just have to look at the spam we all get that is totally inappropriate for us . . . I have had messages addressed to Mrs J. by name that tells me my 'erections' can benefit from buying Viagra in high volumes at cheap prices!! . .(the title Mrs. should have been their first clue )
They have been tricky lately . . the main words in the message are encased in a spotty background artwork so the email 'rules' can't be used to reject them. Titles have changed too with 'Help Me' and R.R.R etc being used without any meaning .
DEMOCRACY = Voters deciding by Poll on who will be the local member that "Big Business" will push around.
gee i wish i could get rid of the offensive spam-email i seem to be getting lately i have tried all i can think of has anyone got a cure for it-some people are just really sick-
When I was with Iprimus I got a lot of spam in my Outlook Express mail, and it was like Sillygostly's Mum gets plus Viagra and other 'dodgy' medications. I used to get more in my Hotmail account than I do now. I may only get 2 per week in it now, and I never get spam in my Gmail.
gee i wish i could get rid of the offensive spam-email i seem to be getting lately i have tried all i can think of has anyone got a cure for it-some people are just really sick-
No offence June. But why did you post it on eblah in the suggestion box?
Did E Blah send you the spam?
Fran: I love the outfit, Miss Babcock. C.C.: Of course, it's an Aldolfo. Niles: Hitler?
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) took legal action against 26-year-old Lance Thomas Atkinson, whose company sent millions of unsolicited emails for herbal goods, replica watches and adult products.
Atkinson has already been fined $16 million by US authorities.
He has also been banned from sending unsolicited commercial emails for seven years.
This the Federal Bureau Of Investigation (FBI) We are writing in response to our track light monitoring device which we received today in our office about the illegal transactions that you have been involve in for a long time now.
We understand from our general investigations that some con men from Nigeria has been ripping you off your hard earned money with the pretense of dealing with ATM CARD Company that will deliver a Card to you and the proposed amount which was to be transferred to you is the sum of $5,000,000 Usd as stated in our record here.
We also got a complain from our German counterpart stating that your identity/information's was used to dupe a German business man to the tune of $67 Million Usd by some Nigerian Fraudsters which you have been in contact with for some time now.
The German Government has ordered for your urgent arrest regarding the crimes that was committed with your name,after all the series of investigations conducted here in our office we tracked your record and we found out that you have never been jailed or had any fraudulent case that may jeopardize your image and personality.
All this information's are on record and we are going to use it against you in the world court when this case will be brought before it and we called the Nigerian High Commission for an urgent compensation for the bad deed that has been committed with your name.
The Nigerian Government has made available the sum of $950,000.00 Usd for your compensation and then we would like to inform you to stop any further communications with the con men so that you will not be brought before the law..
We also discovered that you have made some payments to them earlier for this same funds that was to be sent to you.
Don't forget that all your properties will be confiscated as soon as you are jailed because it will be believed that you got them from fraudulent and dubious business transactions like the one that you are in right now.
We have forwarded a copy of this information's to all the states crime agencies including,
National Crime Information Center (NCIC)
CrimTrac Agency, Canberra,
Crime and Corruption Commission
Crime and Misconduct Commission
Home Land Security Service.
Economic And Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)
Nigerian Local Metropolitan Police (NLMP)
So all you need to do right now in other to clear your name from the scam list which has already been forwarded to our office is to secure the CLEAN BILL CERTIFICATE immediately.
This Certificate will then clear your name from the scam list and also after the Certificate has been issued to you, you will then forward it to the payment officer for the urgent transfer of your compensation funds of $950,000.00 Usd.
You are required to forward to us your private contact number for oral communications and don't forget that you will be given only 72hours to secure the CLEAN BILL CERTIFICATE or you will face the law and its consequences.
Your e-mail address is now under our e-mail track monitor, so you should make sure that you don't respond to any e-mail that is being sent to you from anybody or organization that claims to be working for the Nigeria Government.
Never you forward any part of our contact with you to the con men and seize all further communication with any ATM CARD Company acting for the release of the funds to you.
Forward the details of the payment you made to them earlier, and also all the information's/documents that was forwarded to you by those criminals that you have been in contact with for a long time now.
Get back to us as soon as you receive this e-mail so that we can guild you on how to secure the Certificate within 72hours.
Logged
gee i wish i could get rid of the offensive spam-email i seem to be getting lately
