Off Topic: Warning: Trolling for Dollars, Scammers hard at work

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Norman Bauman wrote:

> I immediately realized that it was a scam, because I had just read a Wall
> Street Journal story about it,

I'd like to read that article.

> so I forwarded the first one to PayPal. They
> didn't seem to be too interested.

The ISP at least feigned some interest. Not long after I posted that here, I
got
another of these supposedly from the ISP (but apparently a different
scammer).
I haven't yet reported the one "from" Ebay -- my guess is they won't care much.

But you should have seen the worksmanship on those forms, etc. Absent some
foreknowledge, or a reasonably suspicious mind, you'd never question it.

Is this an epidemic yet ? Imagine all the older seniors and generally clueless

computer users who must be falling for these.

> Incidentally, because you included the phrase "Failure Notice" in the
> heading, my Eudora filter sent your message to my "Bounced Mail" folder.

Sorry about that. The original thread was from another List, and dealt with
something that is also quite insidious: forged non-delivery notices "from" your

ISP, which in fact carry a virus or Trojan payload. I don't worry about stuff
like
that, because I do zero mail on the Winblows side, and I've yet to find one of
those
things that can touch the OS I do use, whether I bother with an antivirus
program
or not.

The fact that the perpetrators seem to be largely ignored does bother me,
though.
As to the Spammers, which Robert mentioned, I think we should bring back public

flogging, as in the naval tradition of the 1800's. There is already supposed
to be a
federal law against junk faxes, yet I still get enough of those (averages two a
day) to
drain the fax machine's ink cartridge well before its time. I've put a
Telezapper
gizmo on the voice line (annoying to all, but has probably reduced those calls
by
about 70 % after three months), signed up for the national 'Do Not Call" list.
Without withdrawing from the world, what else can we do ?


Jordan