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Along with spam advertisements hawking prescription medicines, ‘cheap’ mortgage rates and online gambling sites, there are a number of common scams whose sole goal is to separate you from your money.

One of the most common is the Nigerian bank scam. Someone sends you an email pretending to have some kind of relationship to a government official who has recently died, most often in Nigeria. They claim to know about money that was deposited in a secret account that is not accessible to them. In exchange for paying the “transfer fees” and accepting the money in your account, you get to keep a large portion of it. Of course, there is no money and they just want to get your bank account information and the transfer fees you send them.

Other scams offer investments with huge paybacks. They always claim to be risk-free naturally, but once you’ve sent them your money it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever see any of it again, let alone profit. A similar scam involves credit cards for people with poor credit ratings. You send them a security deposit and processing charge and they send you a credit card. Unfortunately, once they have your fees you’ll never hear from them again.

Remember these offers are worse than even ordinary spam. Legitimate businesses do not promote their products by spamming. They e-mail selected groups, generally those who have purchased from them before or voluntarily offered an e-mail address. Other offers should usually be ignored. Simply hit your delete button. However, even highlighting the e-mail in order to delete it can signal a spammer that you received one.

How To Avoid Getting Stung

First, never reply to spam. This just tells the spammer that your email is in fact valid and the amount of spam you’ll receive will quickly multiply. Some spam will even include a link at the bottom for removing yourself from their list. If it’s a true spam email, don’t use this - it just confirms your email address as well. If you did sign up to receive the email however, this is a legitimate way of removing yourself from future mailings.

Never send any private information like credit card numbers or username & passwords by email. Legitimate companies like Paypal or your bank will never ask for these things directly through email.

How do you know whether it’s spam? Since, one man’s spam is sometimes another’s welcomed advertisement, there’s no perfect answer. But there is one good rule of thumb: if you don’t recognize the sender, it’s probably not someone you want to hear from. After all, how many former dictators in Nigeria are you likely to know?

We’ve all received spam trying to sell us things such as prescription medications, cheap mortgages and internet gambling. Most people just hit delete and move on, but there are some scams that are a little more serious.

One of the most common is the Nigerian bank scam. Someone sends you an email pretending to have some kind of relationship to a government official who has recently died, most often in Nigeria. They claim to know about money that was deposited in a secret account that is not accessible to them. In exchange for paying the “transfer fees” and accepting the money in your account, you get to keep a large portion of it. Of course, there is no money and they just want to get your bank account information and the transfer fees you send them.

Another fairly common scam is investments with extraordinary returns. They’ll claim to be risk-free but this is obviously not the case. Once you send them your initial investment, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever hear from them again, unless it’s to ask for more money.

Remember these offers are worse than even ordinary spam. Legitimate businesses do not promote their products by spamming. They e-mail selected groups, generally those who have purchased from them before or voluntarily offered an e-mail address. Other offers should usually be ignored. Simply hit your delete button. However, even highlighting the e-mail in order to delete it can signal a spammer that you received one.

How To Avoid Getting Scammed

Firstly, never ever reply to spam, either by hitting reply or by clicking a link in the email. These things will only serve to confirm your email address is active and you will shortly start to receive much more spam than you do already.

Never send any private information like credit card numbers or username & passwords by email. Legitimate companies like Paypal or your bank will never ask for these things directly through email.

What is spam to one person may be a welcomed advertisement to another, so it isn’t a simple thing to stop. But in general, if you don’t recognize the person sending you the message, it’s probably not someone you wanted to hear from. After all, how many former dictators can there really be in Nigeria?

With PDF type of spam, a junk email is sent out with a PDF file attachment, which most anti-spam filters cannot or do not read. These attachments range from rudimentary to professional-looking documents. The text in the body of the email is usually nonsensical gobbledygook that the spam-filter does not recognize as junk mail.

The use of junk mail with PDF attachments takes up even more Internet bandwidth. This is because PDF files are generally much larger than the embedded pictures and graphics used in image spam. Image spam is typically in GIF format; PDF files are upto 3 times the size of these files.

Protecting Your Kids

Like all other Internet users, children are just as susceptible to receiving spam as are adults. And because spam is an equal opportunity menace, kids are just as likely to receive spam that contains adult and pornographic material. While there is really no way to totally eliminate the possibility of your kids receiving spam, there are steps you can take to minimize it.

Spam Blocker - Your email service may come with a spam blocker. If it does not, it may be worth your while to invest in one for your child’s computer. Where-as your email filter filters incoming email into folders, the spam blocker blocks spam from going through the system. It checks your mail server every 10 minutes, where it deletes the spam and destroys any viruses it finds. Legitimate email is let on the server and downloads to the inbox when you log in.

Spammers tend to direct the dictionary attacks at the large email companies, which have a large number of customers, which can be your kid.

Using your email spam filter, you can set up a rule that will ensure that a copy of every email that is sent and received on your child’s account is forwarded to your own email address

Whether a given email is spam or not spam can be said to be in the eye of the beholder. There are legitimate email marketers out there, who comply with all applicable laws when they do their bulk emailing. They will, for example, only send their advertising to recipients who have subscribed to their emailing list. In fact informal studies have shown that currently, only about half of all spam is deceptive or fraudulent; roughly half of all spam contains genuine marketing messages. Thanks to spammers, all email marketing is tainted with a bad name.

The nature of spam has less to do with its commercial content than with the fact that it is unsolicited and sent out in bulk. There are two categories of spam: unsolicited bulk email and unsolicited commercial email.

The top tricks of the spammer

Manipulating Text: This is one of the most commonly used spamming techniques. Spammers will manipulate the text in the email, to foil the anti-spam filters. They may, for example, deliberately misspell some words: “M0rtg4ge” for example. They may add characters or spaces to words in the email header, to make the email seem unique from other email. Like this: X_A_N_A_X Here’s an example, . They may also insert random strings of text within the email.

Image-based Spam: The spammer sends out spam that contains an image in GIF format. This image bears the spammy message. Image-based spam is effective in by-passing spam filters because they are generally text-based.

Email spoofing: Email spoofing involves the use of a fake email header that is written to make it look like someone other than the spammer sent the email. Very often, the spammer will make it look like the email came from a credible source such as your bank or yahoo, and try to get you to reply with personal information such as a password, social security number or credit card number. This technique is widely used because it is easy to do, and tends to catch the recipients off guard.

Web beacons: A web beacon, also called an “invisible GIF,” is an image sent out with spam that is invisible to the recipient. When the email is opened, the spammer will be alerted that your email address is “live.”

Spam is definitely irritating and maliciously destructive at worst. Buying the right anti-spam software will go a long way toward protecting you from the spammers of the world.

With the rise of spam the CAN-SPAM was enacted in January, 2004. The act covers any email which have as its purpose advertising or promotional efforts for any service or product, including those whose contents reside solely on a web site.

One legal initiative aimed at fighting spam is the “Digital PhishNet” (DPN), which was established in 2004. It is a collaborative effort between the Internet industry and criminal law enforcement. Its purpose is to identify and to prosecute spammers who break the law through phishing. Online auction sites, financial institutions, ISPs and other groups within the industry are all involved in this imitative. Important data and information is forwarded in real time to law enforcement.

One major provision of the law - The recipient must be fore-warned of any sexually explicit information the email may contain. This warning must be displayed in the email’s subject line.

Protect yourself from the spam in your inbox

Friend or Foe? Just because an email has been sent to you by a friend, do not assume that it safe for you to open any attachment that comes with it. Contact your friend and verify that they did indeed send it. Very often, spammers will attach a virus to their spam, which, if opened, will hijack your email program and mail itself out to every email address in your address book. This fraudulent email will appear to the recipients to have been sent by you. If they in turn, open this email attachment, the same malicious cycle is repeated.

Never Respond. Do not click on any banner advertising or send a reply to a spam message. Doing this lets the spammer that yours is a “real, live” address, which will only result in a deluge of even more spam. Unless you have specifically subscribed, do not click on any unsubscribe messages contained in junk mail. Most of these are only intended to fool you into confirming your address as valid. Also, do not forward any junk chain letters you may receive.

Reporting spam abuse

Saving and sending the entire email header is an important step in reporting spam. The header of every email you receive will contain information on the full chain of computers through which the email passed in order to get to you. Generally, most email will pass through at least four computers: The spammer’s computer, the spammer’s ISP, your ISP and finally your computer. This is the most reliable way for an anti-spam service to track down the spammer’s ISP because the spammer will camouflage the “from” address.

As the email passes through each computer, information is added to the header indicating who the mail came from, as well as where they are sending it. While this header information will seem complicated, you just need to make note of the originating ISP, which will be easy to recognize. For example, if you receive your mail through AOL and you note “yahoo” in the string of information, then you will know to report the spam to yahoo.

You can report to www.spamabuse.org. This is a third party reporting agency.