Click Here originally published December 2003 in The Panther<\/p>\n
By Lee C. Sonko<\/p>\n
\u201cSpam, spam, spam, egg and spam.\u201d The comedy troupe Monty Python\u2019s Flying Circus performed a skit some 25 years ago where an unfortunate restaurant goer had no choice but to order a meal that had spam in it because that was pretty much all that was on the menu. If you haven\u2019t seen the skit, I highly recommend it. It\u2019s pretty darn funny. The name of that ham-inspired product has been co-opted by the computer world. Here is a definition of \u201cspam\u201d from the American Heritage Dictionary, \u201cUnsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail.\u201d<\/p>\n
I get about 25 spams a day. Doing a little math, that\u2019s over 9,000 pieces of junk mail a year! If I got that much paper junk mail, I wouldn\u2019t ever need to turn the heat on in the winter; I\u2019d just burn the junk mail. This is a huge nuisance for most everyone. I get advertising for all manner of things. Mortgage services, debt consolidation services, unmentionable personal services, discount prescription drugs, weight loss products\u2026 the list goes on forever. Most of the offers sound way too good to be true. Because they are. If I could give you only one piece of advice, it would be to never respond to an unsolicited email, no matter how enticing. If you respond to one of these shady organizations, even to unsubscribe, they\u2019ll know that you read your email and will start to send you even more spam.<\/p>\n
Here is one particular type of email solicitation that I feel I should warn you about. I\u2019ve gotten it 50 times or so in the last 5 years. The email might read something like this, \u201cMy name is Mbeki Mbetsu. I was the Minister of Defense in the recently ousted Nigerian government. I have amassed twenty-seven million dollars ($27,000,000) in a bank account but I need your help to get it out of the country. I will gladly give you five million dollars if you help me.\u201d This is a scam run by some very bad people. Every day, the US State Department gets some 600 pieces of correspondence from people that have been taken by these thieves. Approximately $100 million dollars has been stolen from Americans by scams like this. People have lost their entire life savings to these people and, according to the State Department, at least 17 people have been killed trying to get their money back! These are bad people! Scams like this one are the third largest industry in Nigeria. Go ahead and read that last sentence again. There are many ways in which the scam works but the simplest way is that the \u201cMinister of Defense\u201d asks for your bank routing number so he can transfer the money into your account. But instead of putting the money into your account, he transfers all of the money out into his own foreign account. Poof, money gone.<\/p>\n
A recent version of this scam talks about a Christian Missionary that needs help getting trunkloads of gold out of Liberia. The wording is different but the idea is the same. How do you protect yourself from these people? Simple, don\u2019t reply to them. Always follow the age-old saying: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is, especially on the internet.<\/p>\n
So how do you get rid of spam in general? Unfortunately, there is no perfect way to do it. But there are a few things you can do that help.<\/p>\n
Speaking of that last point, telemarketing, everyone has likely heard about the new federal Do Not Call List. If you don\u2019t want to receive telemarketing calls, then you should go to www.DoNotCall.gov and sign up. It\u2019ll take 3 months for the service to start after you sign up but if you don\u2019t like being pressed to buy vinyl siding that you don\u2019t need during dinner, it\u2019s just the thing!<\/p>\n
Another very useful thing is the Direct Marketing Association\u2019s Mail Preference Service. Signing up for this will dramatically reduce the amount of unsolicited junk mail you get in your postal mail box! Go to www.dmaconsumers.org and click on \u201cRemove My Name From Those Lists.\u201d It\u2019s not perfect, but any direct marketer that uses the Direct Marketing Association\u2019s master list will take you off their list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Click Here originally published December 2003 in The Panther By Lee C. Sonko \u201cSpam, spam, spam, egg and spam.\u201d The comedy troupe Monty Python\u2019s Flying Circus performed a skit some 25 years ago where an unfortunate restaurant goer had no choice but to order a meal that had spam in it because that was pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-click-here-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}