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When Common Sense Fails
The Internet Guide to Email Warnings & Spam
by Rey Barry    

"Come kick the football, Charlie Brown," says Lucy.
Charlie runs to kick it, Lucy pulls it away. Brown falls on his butt.
Happens to Charlie again and again. Every time Lucy
holds the ball, Charlie runs to kick it.

The Charlie Browns of this world never learn.
Pardon me for asking, but are you a Charlie Brown?

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 an email warning 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; Disney is not giving everyone free vacations. There is no free lunch. There is no justification for passing on any preposterous offer "in case it's true." Common sense should tell you it isn't true. Ever.

A telltale sign 99% of the time that an email claim is bogus: When it says "we checked it out and it's legit." (I have the research to prove that.)

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 check out other urban legends here. It's www.urbanlegends.com. Additional hoaxes common in cyberspace can be found at Don't Spread That Hoax.

3. One of the most seen examples: 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. 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.

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? Neither did anyone else. Delete unfunny jokes. Don't be the fool who passes them on.

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 is a hoax. 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 just a few close friends, 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 forces the use of HTML code in email. There's 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. ALL those sob stories are clever cons to line the pockets of swindlers. They look so real because con artists copy real charity appeals, 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 support them.

10. No one ever reaped rewards off an email chain letter because virtually no one sends money. They circulate because hope springs eternal in each year's new crop of adolescents.

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 met Craig.) 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 and ignorant email.

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.

Call me god-like, but it's my belief that anyone egotistic enough to believe he really 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.

It's understandable this scam can happen to people who, in the 21st century, still believe in gods and devils and astrology, werewolves, virgin births, chants, prayer, and rewards "you deserve." If someone you expect to inherit money from fits that, peek in their checkbook periodically. You're less likely to find a Nigerian scammer than a greedy pastor from the neighborhood but the effect is the same, and you should know before they drain the tank.

The most dangerous thing you can do with spam is click on a web site in the message. No matter how real it looks, 99% of the time the address is a ruse. Often, and that means often, going to that site triggers an invisible download of spyware looking for passwords and credit card information that you type on your computer.

Because spam looks innocent and harmless, identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the world.

Spam is also a way to part fools from their money. It's a fact: half the world has two-digit IQs, and naivety and senility abound. Spammers have good pickings. Don't fall for too-good-to-be-true offers, or even those that "sound reasonable." Never respond to spam in any way. Just 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, despite what it often looks like. Ignore what it looks like. It looks that way because looking that way works. There is no way to get your money back and no defense except common sense.

Here's the truth about spam, and how the US Congress took away all effective controls.

First the essential warning: every time you click REMOVE in a spam, you register your email address on a list of "People who responded" revealing 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 says, ignore REMOVE.

Did you know that spam is outlawed in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, and Germany? That 22 states in the US had laws against spam, some you 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 removed by federal law any chance to control it.

Most, but 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 spammers.

Why? 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 and we lost. The new law will probably mean the death of email as we know it.

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 a chance for identity theft.

Your spam doesn't always come directly from swindlers. You also get spam from multi-level market dupes conned into believing they're promoting a real service. They are working for crooks, sometimes for crooks inside prisons, and don't know it.

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" is never that. It's a clever career criminal who knows how to exploit weaknesses in order to pull a scam.

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. Most crooks now mis-spell words in the Subject line or the message itself to fool spam filters.

Users of on-line sites like eBay or PayPal, and people who bank on-line, will receive messages (I get a few every day) that look exactly like they come from the on-line service, and request registration confirmation for one good reason or another. The link they supply to click on is the URL of your on-line service.

But it's actually 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 it's a great line of work to be in. Practically no one gets caught. Tracking down the perpetrator is too expensive for law enforcers even if it's in your own country, and usually it's not. Even if they find who did it the chance of coming up with the evidence to convict is slim. This makes credit card fraud and identity theft very attractive to anyone so inclined.

Congress responded by passing a law that looks like it offers protection, while in fact it makes protection impossible. It "outlawed" things already outlawed that spammers do just the same, then removed or crippled the enforcement powers.

What Congress did was give spammers free access to us. They said spammers can legally send us anything unless we "opt out." Congress required us to do what everyone knows we must NEVER do: contact each spammer and request to be removed. REMOVE is an automated email address collector. It tells the spammer yours is a working address to send spam to. That is what's now required by act of 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 have no idea the enormous problems spam is causing. Why?

Testimony before both committees was very limited. They did not allow testimony from anti-spam activists. The committees invited testimony from the lobbyists for the Direct Marketing Association. They then asked the DMA lobbyists to write a draft bill, and with a few minor changes that's what they passed. It's a bill setting rules for legitimate advertisers.

Authorities tell us that today approximately 65% of all emails are spam and, thanks to Can-Spam, it could reach 80% by the end of 2004. 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 greatly helped.

In the unlikely event you can 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 right away. It killed all those state laws. Direct Marketing Association members felt threatened by them.

Currently AOL and Earthlink have suits pending against businesses that help distribute spam. Whether Conspiracy to spam suits will work in the courts is anyone's guess but win or lose, a few rotten people will have headaches and big lawyer bills. That won't stop other huge spam conspirators like Road Runner (rr.com) but it may make some small shops quit distributing it.

The only protection left for you and I against spammers is ... nothing. Spam will flow in every day and, if you don't clear it, will fill your mailbox to capacity and real email will be refused. Since that real mail can be of serious importance in this day of e-commerce and on-line billing for things like car insurance, this can be real trouble. Congress said that's too damn bad. Like it or lump it.

If you think we've been badly treated by Congress there are two ways to show it. You can email and complain, and you can put them on spam lists so they see what we're up against. 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 here.

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 so 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, 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.