Musings —01.09.2016 09:18 AM
—The only way to deal with email spammers
Is this. And take their kind offer to transfer you $2.5m in gold bullion, naturally.
Musings —01.09.2016 09:18 AM
—Is this. And take their kind offer to transfer you $2.5m in gold bullion, naturally.
You should surf into scamorama.com. It’s a website dedicated to people who make up ridiculous characters to respond to and play with scammers.
Similarly, this is how I dealt with a fake phone call from “Microsoft” a couple of years ago.
It was one of those calls where they tell you they’ve detected a virus on your computer and they want to help me clean it.
Usually I just hang up with a few unkind words but I played along this time. I pretended that I wanted his assistance so I asked him first how he knew my computer was infected. He said my CLSID informed his main Microsoft server that it was my home computer that had problems so then I asked him what my CLSID was and he gave me a really long set of numbers and letters.
I told him I wanted to see if that really was my CLSID and that’s when the fun started.
Every time he told me to perform a function or open a program on my computer I made some clicking sounds on my keyboard and then told him I’d run into a problem.. like “uh oh, I just got a runtime error”. Or “that program won’t open because it says I’m missing a .dll file”. I did say that I was glad they called because it’s obvious my computer has some serious problems.
He was getting more and more frustrated and then I told him I was running Windows 95. He sputtered for a while but wasn’t sure what to make of that and passed me on to another “tech” LOL.
This guy was pretty much the same story.. every time he asked me to do something I just couldn’t get it to work and then I told him that for some reason my recycle bin kept opening every time I did what he told me. After about another 5 minutes he suddenly told me he was calling from India and was wondering if I ran a business of any kind in Canada and could I give him any more work? Not really sure exactly what he meant but I said sure I could.
I gave him the phone number for the TPS fraud squad and told him to ask for Seymour Hair.
Suppressing my laughter was not easy. But after 15 minutes I was starting to get bored so I asked him to hold on for a minute and put the call on hold. I waited about another 2 minutes, checked the line and he was still there so I turned on my clock radio to “The Fan” and left the live receiver beside that for a while. I checked it about 5 minutes later and he’d finally hung up.
If I do this again, and I probably will, I’ll add my fictitious helper monkey into the conversation.. it isn’t very helpful and bites a lot LOL.
Spam is a noxious weed-like issue that has plagued us all since the dawn of the Internet.
However, what we’ve seen evolve is a market where honest small business owners are shackled by moronic legal tarpits like the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation and the real criminals are ever able to evade scrutiny or control because they are everywhere. Just not in Canada.
That said, we know one thing: our internet service providers are more than capable of controlling IP addresses from which email messages of a less-than agreeable type originate.
My question: why don’t they use the tools at hand or give us the option / power to control the source of email and be done with it?
Warren,
Stupid me. All these years I thought Graça Machel was Mandela’s second wife.
That is great! Thanks for posting – I’ve shared with many.
In all seriousness, there are at least a couple of very easy solutions to spam, but no one wants to pursue them.
1. Track all internet access, and don’t allow anyone online who hasn’t registered with an ISP. We do it with cars; why aren’t we willing to do it with something equally potentially-destructive? It’s a bit difficult at this point to put the toothpaste back in the tube, but ISPs are still the gateway. There must be a way to track these things.
2. Charge $0.01 per email. For the vast majority of people, the cost will be inconsequential. However, for the spammers, it becomes expensive in a hurry. Plus, it incentivizes people to invest in an anti-virus (seriously, you can’t afford $40/year??), and be more careful with their passwords.
The problem with both solutions is that people have come to expect the internet and email to be free, and effort-free. That’s just not a realistic perspective, if you want security.