American Myths - Do you believe all 10? What the "Can Spam" law means to you The secret of life |
The Guide to using Email by Rey Barry & the Freeware Hall of Fame
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"Come kick the football, Charlie Brown," says Lucy.
The Charlie Browns of this world never learn.
Pardon me for asking, but are you a Charlie Brown in the email world?
The email world is full of Charlie Browns. They are the people who forward dire email warnings and alerts again and again without checking to see if they're true, and fall on their butt.
No one told them they should check. No one told them how.
Are there signs showing that a Warning coming to you in email is a hoax and should be deleted?
Yes, and common sense is the starting point to see them.
1. Common sense should tell you big companies would NEVER do business by chain letter; Bill Gates is not handing out $1000 to everyone who asks; Microsoft or Disney are not giving everyone free vacations or running lotteries. Sorry to be blunt but only the lowest level IQs send you such things, and you might be sharing their office or be related to them by marriage. Or be using Facebook, Twitter or other social media designed from the ground up to legitimize numbskulls. No one awarded your email address a prize; no stranger needs to take you into his confidence for a deal. If you respond to those emails you are a moron and should close your email account immediately. There is no justification EVER for passing on a preposterous offer "in case it's true." It's never true. It's always a snare for fools. A telltale sign reliable 99.9% of the time that an email claim is bogus is when it says "we checked it out and it's legit." Another telltale sign reliable 9 times in 10: a string of question marks or exclamation points in the subject line. (I've done the research to prove both of those.) 2. There is no kidney theft ring in New Orleans, NYC, or anywhere else on the planet. No one is waking up in a bathtub full of ice, even if a friend of a friend swears it happened to their cousin. It's an urban legend easily disproved. The National Kidney Foundation has repeatedly issued requests for victims of organ thieves or doctors or hospitals to come forward and confirm one of these. None has. That's none, as in zero. Not even your friend's cousin. Like most gee whiz email it's a hoax. When you were a kid did anyone ever play a trick on you? Some folks get their kicks making fools of others, and the Internet gives them an international audience. That's the origin of email hoaxes.
You can AND SHOULD check out claims reported in emails and anywhere else. My first choice for checking out email warnings is snopes. Another good one is urban legends. Additional hoaxes common in cyberspace can be disproven (or occasionally proven) at Don't Spread That Hoax. 3. One of the most seen examples in earlier days: Neiman Marcus doesn't sell a $200 cookie recipe. Never did. The story was made up in fun and it's been traveling the Internet picking up believers since the early 90s. I tried the recipe 3 times. It makes OK cookies. At a charity bazaar you can charge several bucks per cookie because everyone has heard of them and wants to try one. 4. Other "fun" messages. No one over 12, or sane, or keeping up with his meds needs or wants to know 500 ways to drive a roommate crazy, irritate co-workers, gross out bathroom stall neighbors, and creep out people on elevators. Again, that's moron-to-moron email. We all heard how many engineers, college students, Usenet posters, and people from every world ethnicity it takes to change a light bulb. Did you laugh? Nor did anyone else. Don't be the airhead who passes on unfunny jokes. 5. Reality check. Is anyone home? Even if NASA rocket disasters HAD contained plutonium that rained down over the eastern seaboard, do you really think this - or other astonishing news - would reach the public via an AOL chain letter? Someone wrote it in fun, sent it out, and knee-jerk mail forwarders did the rest. Let such email die! 6. There is no "Good Times" virus. In fact 99% of the email virus warnings since email began are hoaxes. You should never, ever, EVER forward an email virus warning until you first confirm it at an actual site of an actual company that deals with viruses. One reliable, free site is Symantec which handles viruses for IBM: http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html Another is Norton anti-virus http://www.norton.com. If the sites are busy and you can't get in, keep trying until you can. You don't want to be the boy who cried wolf so often no one listened when a real wolf showed up. After all, one virus warning out of 100 (like the "I Love You" virus) is real. 7. If your CC: mail forwarding list is more than 50 people, you are a menace to cyberspace and are going to hell. There you will be assigned to send 10 copies of the Good Luck chain letter to yourself and follow the instructions exactly - never breaking the chain - by sending 10 more copies to yourself for eternity. Your only food will be Neiman Marcus cookies. 8. When writing email don't use HTML. Genuine email calls for plain text. HTML is for spammers, advertisers, and bogus charities. The AOL version 6 mail reader forced the use of HTML code in email. There is no way to turn it off. One has to wonder what those fools were thinking. Things went back to normal in Version 7. AOL's Version 6 is not acceptable over the Internet and should never be used. 9. Never forward charity requests. Sorry, but ALL those sob stories are clever cons to line the pockets of swindlers. They look so real because con artists copy real charity appeals byte-for-byte, substituting their own made up charity name and address. Of course the message looks super-genuine. Con artists aren't fools. Anything but. The fools are the people who circulate their appeals, or send money. 10. People can reap rewards off an email chain letter because there are so many fools among us. They circulate because hope springs eternal in each year's new crop of adolescents. When these people grow up, they will be taken in by Ponzi schemes. 11. Craig Shergold was born in 1979, is not a kid, is not dying of a brain tumor, and does not want business cards, get well cards, phonecards, trading cards, Get Out of Jail Free cards, the St. Louis Cards, or ANY cards. Billionaire John Kluge bought him an operation in March, 1991, at the Univ. of VA Medical Center a few blocks from me. (I know Craig personally.) The operation was a success. The tumor is gone. Even Ann Landers said STOP year after year but still the appeal for cards appears in clueless church newsletters. 12. Help Get Money Out of [name a country] And Grow Rich. Everyone gets these emails. The US Secret Service calls them 419 schemes, named for a Nigerian law they break. They are all frauds. Thanks to greed and gullibility it's a successful international con. Since the 1980s foolish Americans and others have lost hundreds of millions to this scam. The Secret Service devotes a web page to explaining how the scam works at http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml. There are also web sites devoted to them such as http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/ . But the sad laugh comes from news stories exposing simpletons like the longtime treasurer of Alcona County, MI, Thomas Katona, who admitted in court in January 2007 that he had lost $1.25 million of taxpayer money, plus his own life's savings, in a Nigerian scam that people in his bank warned him about over and over! Or the Californian (described as "Reagan's neuroscientist") who, according to his son, gave the swindlers $3 million and still believes "just another payment" will free up his windfall. Or the Harvard research doctor who, after costing himself and friends hundreds of thousands of dollars, is incapable of admitting he was taken. It is my belief that anyone egotistic enough to believe he was singled out via email from across the world to be offered great wealth deserves to lose every penny he has. This scam exists for the amusement of the rest of us. Especially pathetic are the protestations of hypocrites whining that greed had nothing to do with suckering them in. I like people. Really. I will be mean and use insulting words because that's the only way to reach the people who most need to be reached. I am not responsible for their brain. Tonight my own has the least treatable cancer there is so listen now to a one-finger typist. There won't be a new and improved version of this later. This is it. It's understandable that obvious scams can happen to people who, in the 21st century, still believe in gods and devils and astrology, werewolves, virgin births, chants, prayer, and their plastic dashboard Jesus. If someone you hope to inherit from fits any of that, peek in their checkbook periodically. While you might find a Nigerian scammer, more likely you'll find checks to the pastor from the neighborhood church who has spotted a target. The result can be the same as a Nigerian scammer, and you better find it before he drains the tank.
If there is just one thing you take away from reading this guide, it's this: NEVER click on a web site link in your email! No matter how -real- that email looks and no matter what the link says, it may take you to a spoof site in Rumania copied byte-for-byte from an actual site you do business with. Only an expert can tell, using tools you don't have. Real email from legitimate sites, unless they are run by fools, will never email you a link to click on. Instead they tell you to log on to your account from your browser so you provide the link, thereby knowing it's legitimate. Run by fools? TDAmeritrade, which has paid thousands in SEC fines for Internet security failures, insists on putting a login link in their customer email, making their email look exactly like email from crooks who copy TDAmeritrade sites byte-for-byte. I and others cannot get the SEC to do anything about this but fine the firm over and over. Is there danger at these bogus web sites in addition to giving the world's crooks what they need to clean out your account? How about triggering an invisible download of spyware which hides in your computer and sends the crooks your other passwords and logins. The ones they harvest are the ones you use at your bank, at PayPal, at Amazon, etc. Because spam is designed to look harmless, and because there are fools like the people running TDAmeritrade, identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the world by far. If people NEVER clicked on links coming to them in email, a substantial portion of identity theft could not happen. That's why this is the most important warning here. Spam is also a smart, safe way to part fools from their money. It's a fact: half the world has two-digit IQs, and naivety and senility know no bounds. Spammers know they have good pickings. Don't fall for really great offers, even those that "sound reasonable."Those people spend days around a conference table perfecting the details to con us. Don't respond to spam. Delete it. In 2005 approx. 795,000 US recipients responded to an email offer and sent money. Nearly all got nothing in return and lost every dime. Spam is sent by experienced professional swindlers - some from their jail cells - who know how to entice us. Ignore what it looks like. It looks that way because they tested it and it worked. There is no way to get your money back and no defense except common sense and warnings like this. Here's something amazing about spam in the United States: the US Congress eliminated all effective controls. You read that right. Responding to claims of 1st Amendment rights, and well-placed campaign contributions, Congress gave spammers the go-ahead. First there is the essential warning that was with us from the start: every time you click REMOVE in a spam, you register your email address on a list of "People who responded" showing that your address is active. The more you click REMOVE, the more spam you get. YAHOO has been telling us this for years. In one test I ran, clicking each REMOVE in spam for one week increased daily spam 400% within two months. Like YAHOO and everyone else knowledgeable says, ignore REMOVE. Did you know that spam is outlawed in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, and Germany? So it can be controlled, if government wants to. Did you know that 22 states in the US had laws against spam, some we could have acted on? Well forget it. In late fall of 2003 the US Congress passed a law nullifying all state anti-spam laws. Congress's law is PRO spam, and it's the only law we can have. Now you know why my cars have bumper stickers reading Congress is the Enemy Most, though not all, spam is international white collar crime, crime that escapes prosecution because it rocks only small boats like you. When asked to do something about it, the US Congress said no. It went the other way. Because a miniscule part of spam is legitimate marketing, it gave its blessing to all. How come? The DMA (Direct Marketing Association, a major congressional campaign donor) complained that its members were being harmed by state anti-spam laws. So in 2003 Congress let them write a federal law to their liking, and passed it. The game is over. The people lost. Every corner of society has its swindlers, cheats, and thieves. In the email world these folks become spammers. They may be claiming to sell life insurance, merchant credit card accounts, debt consolidation, Viagra, whatever. What they are really after is your credit card number and identity theft. How did they get your email address? Legitimately, thanks again to Congress. Congress permitted the owners of web sites to sell advertising space to outsiders, including space that is totally hidden from us and we are never told of. These people will hide programs on web sites you visit, good sites like department stores, stock brokers, banks, and in some states even the DMV and other state agencies. After all, everyone can use an extra buck these days. When you go to the site, hidden programs there search your computer for information about you that's readily available, like your email name and address. Then you get spam from site "partners," the industry term for anyone who will pay for this information. The DMV or bank or department store or whatever site you went to was given YOUR permission to sell your personal data when you clicked "I Agree" to their Terms of Use. You didn't know because the language is intentionally obscure legalese, and Terms of Use are often 50,000 words or more, as long as a novelette. We aren't intended to read them. Congress, when given a chance to do something about that, gave it their blessing. According to Congress, you opted to get that spam, and there should be a link in the message to opt out. But the advertiser has no incentive to seeing you go, and he's on the honor system. Do you think he takes you off his list? Do you think he removes you from the list of contacts he sells to other marketers? Congress didn't provide a means to check! Spam doesn't always come directly from swindlers. We also get spam from multi-level market dupes conned into believing they're promoting a service. They are working for crooks, sometimes even for crooks inside prisons, and don't know it. The industry calls them mules and there are miles of copy on the internet describing how this works. These are the messages that say, "Here is the information you requested" when you didn't. Who write the spam to look like it comes from a friend, or a stranger saying "Hi." The girl who is "lonely, sad, and needs to talk to someone." These are career criminals who knew how to exploit weaknesses. Spammers forge return addresses showing MSN or YAHOO or AOL accounts that don't exist. They forge headers to blame innocent carriers for the spam, and hide everyone really responsible. Some use a trick to make it appear the receiver was the sender. How is all that possible? The authorities designed the system to allow that so people can organize against their government without being caught. It enabled "Arab spring" and such. The leadership feels such a good end is worth all the bad. They are very open about it, and proud the system is out of anyone's control including theirs. Do the crooks share the wealth with these high-minded enablers? I would never believe that, even if there were a crack in the wall. We are from the same caste. Users of on-line sites like eBay or Amazon, and people who bank on-line, will receive messages that look exactly like they come from the on-line service, and request registration confirmation for one logical reason or another. The link they supply to click on SAYS it's the URL of your on-line service. But it's not. It's a clever ruse and if you fall for it you have given your ID, password, and credit card number to someone who will waste no time using them to steal every dime they can get. If you're a crook, internet theft is a great line of work to be in. Practically no one gets caught if they stay within boundaries and rock only small boats. Tracking down petty perpetrators is too expensive for law enforcers even if it's in your own country, and usually it isn't. Even if they find who did it the chance of coming up with the evidence to convict is slim and judges have become famous for not caring. This makes credit card fraud and identity theft very attractive to anyone so inclined. Congress responded with a law that claims to offer protection, while in fact makes protection impossible. It "outlawed" again what was already outlawed, things spammers do anyway, then removed or crippled the enforcement powers. Congress gave spammers free access to us. They said spammers can legally send us anything unless we "opt out." Thus Congress required us to do what everyone knows we must NEVER do: contact a spammer and request to be removed. REMOVE is an automated email address collector. It tells the spammer yours is a working address to sell to other spammers. That is what's now required by the bastards in Congress. "Can-Spam," as the law is termed, was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee. A similar bill came out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The two bills went back and forth several times before the final draft was approved by both houses. Members of Congress insulated themselves from the enormous problems spam is causing. There are several billion spam emails everyday. How? Testimony before both committees was very limited. They did not allow testimony from anti-spam activists, the people with first-hand information who did research on the subject. The committees invited testimony from the lobbyists for the Direct Marketing Association. They then asked the DMA lobbyists to draft a bill, and with a few minor changes that's what they passed. It's a bill setting super generous rules for legitimate advertisers. Authorities tell us that today approximately 85% of all emails are spam, thanks to Can-Spam. Of that, approximately 2% come from legitimate advertisers who follow the law. So the 98% who operate outside the law weren't hurt by the bill. They were helped. In the unlikely event you can actually identify someone who is abusing the law, Can-Spam gives you one tool: you can complain to a government mailbox at a short-handed agency, the Federal Trade Commission, that has far more important things to do than read 12 million spam complaints a day at SPAM@ftc.gov . Some state laws gave us the right to sue spammers, and there were successful suits. Congress took that away. It killed all those state laws. Direct Marketing Association members didn't like them. The only protection left for you and I against spammers is ... almost nothing. Spam will flow in every day and, if you don't clear it, will fill your mailbox to capacity and all email including important email will be refused. Real email can be of serious importance in this day of e-commerce. Many people use on-line billing for car and home insurance, and mortgage payments. When spam fills your mailbox to capacity, you won't receive those bills, or the notices your payment is overdue. To Congress that's your problem. Thus no one aware of this signs up to get important insurance or mortgage notices exclusively by email. Not that we aren't urged and begged to do that right and left because of massive postal savings for the companies and the utilities. Billing via email is free and if it gets lost (well over a million emails a day get lost) we get hit for an overdue payment. Win-win for them, lose-lose for us. I said almost nothing protects us from spam. The exception is getting email through Google's gmail.com and a few other huge enterprises. Unlike smaller Internet Service Providers, the big guys spent the big bucks to filter out spam before it clutters our mail box. My small internet provider hosting this web site for 24 years until now couldn't even filter out email in Chinese addressed to the email equivalent of "occupant." I got as many as 30 a day of those while I was paying them over a thou a year. And I was in the "expert user" group. If you're annoyed at being badly treated by Congress there are ways to show it. You can phone, snail mail, and email to complain, and you can put them on spam lists so they see what they did to us. If they're in the same boat they might keep it from sinking. Let them learn what happens when they Reply to spam and ask to be taken off the list, as they require us to do. This is perfectly legal; Congress itself saw to that. Their email addresses are available at www.webslingerz.com/jhoffman/congress-email.html and what you do with them is no one's business but your own. Note: it has been a long time since the links on this page were tested. Sorry about that. Moving on ... 14. There is no "pending House Bill xxxx" threatening a modem tax nor do specific names and numbers in that hoax ever check out, but email forwarders are people who never check. That's why email hoaxes are successful. There has never been a "warning from the FCC" about modems or the Internet or anything else. The Federal Communications Commission is not a consumer office and does not "warn." This modem tax hoax fooled so many people the FCC put up a Web page to respond and explain. From time to time they take the page down, but when it's up you can read it here. 15. The Post Office is not trying to "recoup losses" by seeking a tax on modems or email or the Internet. For years they had a web page denouncing that canard at www.usps.gov/news/email.htm. (Gone now.) Your state IS part of an international effort to tax e-commerce as part of its sales tax operations, and probably will eventually if it hasn't already, and couldn't care less about your opinion unless you're a high roller contributor. If you are, let the recipient of your largesse know you are against sales taxes on the Internet. The US Congress established a committee to make recommendations pro and con imposing and regulating sales taxes in e-commerce. They made their report. You can read it here. In 2011 California passed an Internet sales tax just the same. 16. When replying to email always include as a quote the part of the message you are replying to. Without that, the recipient may have no idea what you're talking about. Your email software does that with a simple configuration. But do NOT quote the entire message when it is a long string of message comments. Internet doofuses began the game of tacking a comment atop a long thread (or even AFTER!) and letting the trash build and build ... and build. I've seen messages where there was nothing new for 8 or more screens and the new material consisted of "That's for sure." It doesn't take brains to be on the Internet. We've all seen messages where you have to click through page after page of headers showing all the people who passed the message along before the person who passed it to you. DELETE THESE, ALL THESE, before forwarding the message. Your mail program has an edit function for mail you are sending, replying to, or forwarding. Learn how to use it so you are sending only what you want to share, not the crap above and below it. You be the one who emails intelligently and sends only the rose, not the whole thorny mess and the dirt ball it grew in.
Please forward this guide to whomever emails you garbage.
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Rey Barry who has a gmail account and no other as of Feb. 2021 All rights reserved Page last updated March 8, 2021 |