SE-Mail = Fail

SE-Mail – scam electronic Mail not to be confused with snail mail.

I read on Fox News yesterday about a woman that lost $400,000 dollars to an e-mail scam. For those of you who want to read about it, here is the link. But as I thought about how stupid and ignorant this one woman is, I couldn’t help but think that she is not the only one that has fallen for this. If no one fell for this kind of scam, it wouldn’t be around to begin with. So, instead of bashing her for loosing her husbands entire retirement and falling for one of the most stupid scams out there, I will be focusing on who falls for this and why they fall for this.

First, who is targeted: Scammers (people who send out scam e-mails) target older people for several reasons. One reason is that sometimes older people don’t understand the technology that they are using. One instance of this is flash games. My wife instant messaged me to tell me she was playing a flash game (Squirrel shoot) that was e-mailed to her from her grandmother and I immediately told her that flash is one of the easiest ways to get a virus on your computer. Does her grandmother know this? Probably not, and one reason I know this is because I know her grandmother. This grandmother once got a text message from someone and in response took it back to the store and asked for a tech to fix it because she didn’t want text. You can’t fix that kind of thing, instead, you tell them to turn off the service.

Now, why people fall for these scams? A lot of people who fall for these scams at first think that the scam is actually a legit e-mail because they are looking for a get rich quick payout, and by the time they realize that it’s a scam it’s too late. Or in this ladies example, she had put so much money into the scam, she thought by putting more money into it, she could recoup the lost money (isn’t that the same philosophy as gaming addicts fall into), but it didn’t work out that way. What these people need to realize, though, is that get rich quick scheme’s don’t work and PLEASE remember the old adage, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” But these people don’t understand it at all. They see the dollar bills before the common sense.

How to stop se-mail! You can’t. Plain and simple, you cannot stop it because for every thousand of se-mail’s sent out, one person fails for it and that profit is 100% than they would have gotten if hadn’t have sent them out. You can educate people, but there will always be that one guy who falls for it and that one person will be the reason why the scammers continue to do it. There is another reason, why scammers still do it, because as we evolve our technique to stop the, they find a new way to scam people.

Let me get off my soap box and tell you something else that I find really annoying. I have Skype on my pc so that I can talk with Geezers around the country for Skypecast’s or roundtable discussions and it works really well. Last week, though, I got a message from someone saying “High, I’m new to skype and looking for friends. Please click on the link to view my profile.” I know this is a scam right away. How? I look at the address and see that it’s for a site that has nothing to do with Skype. But out of curiosity, I click on it and it takes me to a dating site that you have to pay for to get in. What this is, though was someone trying to get me to sign up and I would believe that they get a percentage of that money because they are “referring me” to that site. I immediately changed my setting from anyone can contact me to only friends, but will that limit my ability to add Geezers to my list of friends? I’m not sure, but we’ll see. Anyway, my point is that when a technology, whether it be text messages, IM, or VOIP phone service over the computer, there is someone out there that is going to try to make money off of a scam. When will it stop? NEVER.