The first thing to look for in an email from someone you don’t know is this: Did they spell our your full name? For instance, you get an email and it says something like “your account with us needs to be updated…” but the beginning of the email says Dear customer, Dear client, etc. The first tip here is that they don’t even know your name. All legitimate accounts such as paypal, your bank, your credit card accounts will address you by mail. Even then do not click on their hyperlink but instead go to your account by typing in your browser the way you would normally go to your account.

I really love the ones that start with “my dearest” and telling me that a long lost relative of mine died and left millions. Would anyone actually fall for this?

Someone mentioned that there should be a way to track these people. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. There are not enough resources to go after these people. I received what looked like a legitimate check for around $3,000 from someone in New York (I live in Las Vegas). The letter attached said that I had to shop at such and such a store and spend about $2.00 there and tell them how the service was and send them back $2,500 and I get to keep $500 for my trouble. It was drawn on a Wells Fargo bank. My husband insisted that it was legit and to prove him wrong I took him to a local Wells Fargo bank. They ran the check and even picked up the phone to call the account owner. The account number was legit but the implied owner of the account was a different company. They told me that Wells Fargo had received 3 other checks like this that same day. I asked what they were going to do about the fraud and they said nothing. Amazing. Why nothing? Their answer was quite simple. The FBI and authorities do not have the time. This was a completely traceable situation too. This was not only fraud but it was mail fraud too! I had their address to send the $2,500 and even had the people’s phone number. My only satisfaction was leaving them tons on phone messages asking them how they sleep at night. I always wondered how many people mailed the $2,500 before seeing if their check would clear first. I did google search the address and could see on “street view” it was an apartment complex.

I have a small website hosted by one of the major ISPs and several email addresses associated with the site. Several weeks ago we received over 6,000 emails saying they were from one of our own email addresses with the subject being various forms of undeliverable mail returned to sender.

After checking into it, and learning it was a spoof and not actually a hacker using our computer as a robot, we wondered how many million emails were sent out to get over 6,000 undeliverable emails, and how many ISP servers and other pieces of equipment were needed to handle all this traffic.

Going one step further, if we were only one of thousands or possibly millions in similar circumstances, or worse, we wonder why ISPs are not more aggressively searching out these people and closing down their sites thereby saving themselves (the ISPs) millions of dollars in server costs and other equipment costs needed to handle the traffic. And wouldn’t the internet be faster with trillions less spam emails? Just wondering!