The Internet Crime Complaint Center has issues warning about an increasing new email scam. According to their website:

Circulation of Fraudulent E-mail Claiming To Be From U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)

A spam e-mail claiming to be from former CBP Assistant Commissioner, Thomas S. Winkowski, is currently being circulated. This attempt to defraud is the typical e-mail scam using the name and reputation of a federal government official to create an air of authenticity.

The spam e-mail indicates the CBP has stopped a Diplomat who is carrying a consignment to be delivered to the recipient’s residence. This consignment allegedly contains millions of dollars, which is revealed to be an inheritance for the e-mail recipient.

As with many other scams, this e-mail advises the recipient they will be permitted to access this inheritance once the recipient has given the sender of the e-mail their personal information.

This e-mail is a hoax. Do not respond.

The U.S. CBP does not send unsolicited e-mails. Consumers should not respond to unsolicited e-mails or click on any embedded links, as they may contain viruses or malware.

It is imperative consumers guard their personally identifiable information (PII). Examples of a person’s PII include, but are not limited to: date of birth; social security number; and bank account numbers. Providing your PII will compromise your identity.

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Technorati Tags: hoax, Internet, malware, SPAM, Thomas S. Winkowski

There is a funny (and true) quote about software engineering!

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning

This is somewhat correct when it comes to Spamming! Spammers are coming with new ideas of spamming everyday. Last month I read a post in Digit forum in which users were complaining about a new way of spamming.

Spam bots register in forums and ask questions which look genuine and after few minutes they register with another user name and answer this question with a link to their site.

Today I had a new experience. I had the following comment for one of my posts.

Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at blackhatbootcamp.com/listofwordpressblogs. I don’t know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.

It looked genuine to me at first. Even my favourite Akismet plugin,which had protected me from 3379 spam comments so far, failed in this case. I did a quick google search for this comment and as I suspected our great James has comments 1000s of blogs with the same comment. Good try James

Technorati Tags: aksismet, GOOGLE, Programming, SPAM, wordpress

I received 23 emails in my Gmail Inbox and 132 emails in my GMAIL SPAM inbox. Thanks to GMAIL spam protection. I hate when some websites ask for email addresses during registration. Most of the sites start spamming the day after you give your email ID

www.slopsbox.com comes to your rescue when you want to register in sites. Unlike other temporary email address sites there is no need for sign up. When there is a need for a temporary email ID just enter any name followed by “@slopsbox.com”

Ex: crankup@slopsbox.com

You can check your emails by logging into www.slopsbox.com with the email id.

www.slopsbox.com Fight the SPAM

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Technorati Tags: SPAM

There is a saying that where ever you go (even to Mars) you will find a Malayalee. I am a frequent visitor of Google gadgets API group. Found something very interesting today.

Malayalee even in the world of SPAM?

Technorati Tags: SPAM

Few minutes after writing my previous post I received the following 2 scraps in my ORKUT account

Technorati Tags: ORKUT, SPAM

My blog is just 3 weeks old and SPAM bots have started hitting my posts.

Being an IT professional I hate SPAM and junk emails. SPAM causes lot of head aches to webmasters. www.indianitforum.com [in which I am a moderator] is no exception. I clean up at least 10 SPAM posts by bots everyday.

Next time when you get a chain email from a friend make sure you pass it only if it is a genuine email.

There are couple of sites available in the internet to check the correctness of a message. www.breakthechain.org is one such site which I always use to validate a chain email. They have a huge collection of chain mails and their history.

Here are some tips which you can follow to reduce spam.

1. When you forward an email make sure that you use the BCC option so that email addresses are hidden.
2. When you add your email address to a public website or forum make sure you add the email ID in such a way that it is difficult for the SPAM bots to identify your ID. Ex: shobankr[at]gmail.com

Here is another trick which you can use to identify the source from which your email ID was picked up by the SPAM bot. Next time when you sign up or post your email ID, post it in the following format (GMAIL ID is required for this)

emailID+[sitename]@gmail.com

Ex: shobankr+crankup@gmail.com

GMAIL has a amazing feature. it ignores all the characters after “+”. So every mail sent to emailID+[sitename]@gmail.com will be delivered to emailID@gmail.com. But “Show options” in gmail reading pane will still show emailID+sitename@gmail.com which will tell you the source of your email .

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Technorati Tags: GMAIL, SPAM, www.breakthechain.org