Author: Chef Jeffrey Allen Kaufman Everyone gets them, we all do, those pesky, irritating emails, you know, the ones that have titles like, "YOU ARE A WINNER" or "YOUR URGENT REPLY IS NEEDED" typed in capital letters to draw attention to it like you should care, right? Well there is more to it then what you may think, and we will cover that aspect of the scam in a few moments.
The fact is, last year alone, hundreds of millions of dollars from all over the glode was handed off to the scam emails. For some of us, the emails mean nothing, you might not even bother reading them and just delete them. Then there are the few who actually believe what they are reading and follow through with the requests these scam artists request, and have either their bank account drained, or lose out on a few hundred dollars.
The scams range from the simple to the extraordinary, Elaborate graphic filled emails, to nothing more than a few short sentences. I have seen emails that have logos and forms like you might expect on a website, logos from Banks to website services such as Paypal and Yahoo. These scams are hard to identify for some people, and they immediately go with the flow without thinking twice. Titled emails like "Your Bank Account is Disabled" to "Please Verify Your Account Information" make people enter in their information without thinking twice. The scam artist will take logos right off of Bank websites and create these scam emails to lead you to a fake email account verification site and get all your information, then bleed your account or transfer the money in it to their own account in their country.
There are plenty of websites on the topic out there, and some are really good ones, totally dedicated to stopping the crime of these scams. Our legal systems are also fighting the scams as well, the FBI even has their own Cybercrime unit.
But is that enough?
One Blogger site that I know of is taking another approach. Just like most of the Anti-Scam websites out there, Blacklisted Email Scams Data Base is posting the most current email scams available, to keep people informed, but they are also doing something nobody else is. Playing the same game these criminals are playing, and using their scams against them.
At Blacklisted Emails, they post the scam and the scam artists email addresses. So? Well have you ever wondered how these scam artists get your email address anyways? They use a "Email Harvester", a web crawler that extracts email addresses from the internet. It's as simple as putting in a search term like this, "Business email addresses for @yahoo @msn @ hotmail @gmail" and then letting the crawler extract all the emails it can find off the Internet.
Well, the owner of this blog site knows that, and takes the time to keep a long of all the scam email addresses that come with the emails, and then hides them in several websites and blogsites, where these crawlers run to to find email addresses. So what happens is that these scam artists extract hundreds of emails, maybe even thousands, and a large portion of those emails they write to are their "brothers in arms" basically wasting their time and flooding one each others email accounts with their own scams.
But the fun doesn't stop there. At Blacklisted Email Scams Data Base they monitor 40+ email accounts, from the general ones like Yahoo and Hotmail to the webmasters@.com and pay for email services. The scam artsist can not stop sending the scams to Blacklisted. They have no clue what email addresses are getting the scams and which ones are posting them, but everyday the owner of this blogsite combs through roughly 200+ emails a day, and posts them, updating the blogsite with 40-100 emails everyday. You can bet this is driving these guys crazy, imagine having your scams posted everyday, without fail, and having no idea who is doing it. With 40+ email accounts floating around, there is no way for these guys to figure it out.
Then there is the added twist, on the site itself is a GPS tracking system, which uses the IP addresses of those who visit the site and then compares them to the IP addresses of the emails received. Pin pointing almost exactly where the scammers are and their origins, causing these guys a little more worry. They visit the site daily now, checking to see if their scams didn't get netted, and they leave frustrated, I can promise you that.
Then there is one more added twist, on the site is two forms of chat. Allowing you and I the "marks" to communicate and say hello to the scam artists. Nothing worse than being confronted by the very people you are trying to scam.
All in all, Blacklisted is taking on one heck of a fight, and their actions are having an effect. Not only are the scam artists extra flooding our Junk Email Boxes, but they are also sending the least bit of email they can, simple 1-2 sentences and that's it. Knowing the more content and information they provide, the more likely people will find their scams.
The point of it all is simple, reading Blacklisted's mission statement says it plain and clear, "We Intend to end the scams" and believe it or not, it seems to be working.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/email-articles/fighting-email-scams-and-turning-the-tide-2949823.html
About the Author Chef Jeffrey Allen Kaufman
Chef turned Internet Guru