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E-mail scammers

You have to hand it to all the e-mail fraud artists out there – they’re getting better.

You have to hand it to all the e-mail fraud artists out there – they’re getting better. You used to be able to spot a fraud a mile away because of the poor grammar, spelling errors, and overly anxious attempts to get you to click on strange Web sites and enter your personal information.

One of the e-mail scams to come my way in the past week, although obviously fake, showed a level of professionalism I haven’t seen before. At last I understood why Internet fraud is up 60 per cent this year, costing gullible people millions of dollars each and every year.

There are also several "phishing" scams going around where people are asked to visit Web sites to update their personal information. These sites appear legitimate with all the proper logos, legal small print, "secure connection" mumbo jumbo, and other official looking window-dressing, and often they already seem to know a lot about you – name, address, phone number – but they’re really just scams to get your social insurance number, credit card number, and other important information.

Here are a few hints to help you determine what’s real and what isn’t:

First of all, nobody gives money away. If you didn’t enter a lottery, you sure as hell didn’t win one.

Secondly, nobody needs your credit number because none of the legitimate companies out there that might already have your most personal information would never, ever lose it. They have back-ups and back-ups for their back-ups. They are also bound by law to keep things in triplicate, and could lose their business licenses – and the confidence of their customers – if they don’t comply.

Thirdly, there will be no need to update your user name or password to access certain sites, unless of course you’ve forgotten them. If that’s the case, the company won’t know until you directly contact them to ask for help.

Fourthly, you can usually do all the updating you need by visiting a company’s legitimate Web site and signing in. If you must follow an e-mail link to get there, check the address – if it’s not clearly an extension of a legitimate site then it could be a spoof.

Lastly, most legitimate companies are in the customer service business, and their correspondence always includes e-mail addresses, phone numbers, 1-800 numbers, fax numbers, etc. Without all of these things, any e-mail should be considered suspect, whatever the source.

If you’re still unsure, you might want to check in with the experts – unless you’re the very first person to receive a fraudulent e-mail request, chances are it will already be posted online at one of these Web sites: Internet Fraud Complaint Centre (FBI and National White Collar Crime Center) at www1.ifccfbi.gov/index.asp; the National Consumers League’s fraud centre at www.fraud.org; ScamBusters at www.scambusters.org and Internet Fraud Watch at www.nclnet.org.

Spyware legislation passes first hurdle

In many ways the U.S. is a giant Petri dish where new laws governing the Internet are created and tested. Not only do the Americans have the financial and technical resources to undertake this experiment, they also have the political will to put new laws into use at a time when most developed countries seem more concerned with matters of individual privacy than law and order.

Whenever a U.S. experiment is successful, and doesn’t infringe too much on free speech, it is usually copied by countries like Canada that don’t have the same resources or political will.

The latest experiment concerns spyware, an insidious technology that gathers information about you and your habits through your Internet connection without your knowledge. Most spyware is relatively benign, tracking your Internet usage to help advertisers better customize their content for you, but some programs can also gather information on e-mail addresses, site passwords and credit card numbers. They can monitor your keystrokes, scan files on your disk drive, report back what applications you own, read your Cookies file, change the default page on your Web browser, etc.

People generally have no idea they even have spyware on their computers until their computer’s performance slows down to a crawl. This happens when so many spyware programs are running at once, they eat up your memory, processing power and Internet bandwith.

Every PC owner should try to purge their computer of spyware at least once a month, or be prepared to spend a few hours deleting files when they finally get around to cleaning their system out. Visit www.downloads.com and type "spyware" into the search window to get a list of all the different programs you can use to block, locate and erase spyware from your system.

Last week the House Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives passed an anti-spyware bill, with criminal penalties (fines and even imprisonment) for individuals and companies that add software to computers without the knowledge or consent of users. The bill would also give $10 million to the Department of Justice to combat spyware.

Since a lot of spyware is generated overseas, this new bill won’t have much reach, but it’s a good starting point for the creation of a wider international law.

If the experiment works, that is.

The politics of dating

To give you a good idea of how polarized the two-party political debate in the U.S. has become in recent years, one of the hot commodities on the Web these days is politically sensitive dating services. Democrats can look for other Democrats, Republicans can seek out other Republicans, and nobody has to get into a shouting match over dinner or experience an awkward first date over whether to go to Fahrenheit 9/11 or a re-release of The Passion of the Christ.

It makes sense – political differences are bigger than ethnic or religious differences these days. Ideological rifts are so deep and so wide they may never be bridged.

In 2004 Archie Bunker would have escorted Meathead out of the house at gunpoint and Alex P. Keaton would have been kicked out of the house when he was 16. Political differences are no longer cute, as the debate gets uglier and uglier, which makes ordinary dating impossible among people who are even remotely political.

But it’s sad commentary as well on the times we live in.

Instead of voting your conscience each election, picking a few issues that are of importance to you and the candidate who best represents those issues, more people are becoming dyed-in-the-wool political sycophants who always vote for the same party, right or wrong.

Instead of dating people you find attractive and intriguing, you seek out the people who are the most agreeable politically, glossing over other shared interests for the sake of political harmony.

If this goes on for long enough, Republican or Democrat won’t be a political affiliation any longer – it will be the start of two new races. Arranged marriages can’t be far behind.