Spam and Scam Nation

What has become of us? My inbox and my home mailbox are stuffed with spam, our blog gets 10-20 pieces of spam per day in our comments section. The messages are always ridiculous. My loan is pre-approved evidently at about 100 different places, my pharmacy orders are piling up somewhere and classmates keep sending me e-cards. I won the French lotto recently and a Nigerian woman needs to talk with me about depositing some money for a period of time in my bank account. Just this morning at home, I received a phone call with a recorded message that said, “Please hold, I have a call for you”. I hung up.

While I was writing this, I checked back to my email and here’s a new piece of spam, “Thanks for your Pharmacy order # 01096.” How ridiculous. Do people really fall for this?

Our company has been receiving calls from clients saying that someone is calling them and representing that they are with our company. I’m pretty sure it’s an attempt to get Social Security numbers from our clients or to try to have them refinance their loan thinking they are doing this with a company they trust.

It’s pretty easy to avoid getting caught up in the spam and scam game. Get a good filter to block spam (mine dumps them into a spam folder and keeps them out of my inbox), NEVER respond to a spam message and if someone calls you do not give out any personal information. It’s safest just to hang up. The onslaught of this stuff won’t stop, in fact, I predict it will increase as technology drops the cost to almost zero to send these messages. With a cost of zero, the return is significant if just one client falls for their scheme.

I have to go, evidently I’ve won a free trip and I have to call someone I don’t know to give them my personal information so I can claim the prize.