Phishing!

Sorry Douggie, I'm not talking about fishing, I'm talking about phishing!

If any of you have an e mail account, you are familiar with phishing. Well perhaps not, if you have a strong iron will or perhaps a very effective SPAM filter you might never see the plethora of e mails offering you penile enlargment, money from a exiled african prince, instant orgasms, an urgent update form your local bank or what ever! You may be amoung the lucky few who have never been offered new and improved morgage rates, or cheap movies, or what ever the spam world has to offer(I aint talking canned meat).

One phishing scam that has me quite annoyed comes in the form of an e mail form PayPal. The e mail looks innocent enough, with a cleverly done front page and all, good enough to fool the best of us I'm sure. They tell you something like "There has been an attempt to hack your account, we have shut down your ability to send and recieve funds, click the following link to resolve this issue" or something alot more clever(I'm not good at phishing!). Their hopes is that, by leading you on this goose chace, you'll eventually type in all your personal information, and the SOB sitting at the other end will suck it up and use your password and such to take you for the sucker you are.

One or two simple e mails once in a wile are easy to detect, but when you get constant e mails all taking differnt forms, from different addresses, it becomes harder and harder to tell the fakes form the real deal. Lets say Paypal's address is Info(at)Paypal.service(dot)com
well one spam e mail would come from lnfo(at)paypal.service(dot)com (The I in info replaced with lower case L) and another Paypalservice(At)info.com and so on and so forth. It's too much!

I had taken the "ignore all e mails form Paypal" approch, as I rarly used my Paypal account anyhow. But eventually it grew difficult. With headers like "Urgent we believe someone has hacked your account" and "purchase confirmation Ipod" or something like that. Your first reaction is "what if its real this time?" So you log onto paypal to see that in fact NO transaction has taken place, and then you head over to their help desk, by phone and ask someone about it they tell you it is a phishing scam and urge you not to give away any password or click on any link. And you go about your marry way...over...and...over...again.

If however you are cought in a moment of ignorance, or just plain gullable, you must endure the torment of what ever computer virus, spyware, or what not the clever computer hacker has tricked you into downloading onto your computer! Sometimes its a harmless virus that can be deleted, other times its a horrid monster that deletes files, spreads to your friends computers and targets anything from numbers you type into your keyboard to private pictures and what ever! If you are even MORE unlucky, or perhaps gullable, you may have typed your password into a mirror site giving away all your personal information and opening yourself up to identity theft! And that my friends, is a totally new balpark!

So I took a different approch. I closed down my Paypal account, deleted my information and account. Nothing against them, as far as E-commerce goes, they are very safe and reliable. However, I am simply not ready for such thing just yet. If I need to buy something, there's always walmart I suppose. Perhaps in a few years when E-Commerce becomes more then norm I shall take the step once again. But as for now, my wallet and I feel much safer away from the busy and exciting world of E-Commerce.

So the all those Paypal e mails I can easily shrug off, knowing that who ever is out there trying to fool me into giving away my private info online, will have to try another sucker.

As for all those other Spam e-mails asking me to buy this, help that, give away this, and surrender that, I'll just have to emplore my tried and true "DELETE" strategy!