There is an ever increasing number of fake Spam products that are disguised as real protection for your computer.

This is known as Scareware. It’s those little flicker boxes that jump up on your screen telling you “click here for a free trial - you’ve been infected” or some other such scare tactic.

Imagine for a moment you are walking along a bustling metropolis street and a guy jumps out at you and “Hey hey I got the real deal designer bags over here, come take a look!” he then proceeds to show you “Prada”, “Chanel”, “Fendi” and all sorts of other “real” designer bags at one one hundredth of the cost it would be in Saks or Neiman Marcus etc. Now, you may consider buying one of these bags, but you would have to know somewhere in your mind that they are fake being that they are being sold in a dark alley on a side street by a guy who clearly doesn’t look legit.

That is not unlike Scareware. So, if you imagine the little pop up boxes etc that hit your computers the way you would in real life it is likely you wouldn’t bite.

If someone offered you a free security system for your house you just have to give them a set of keys you probably wouldn’t go for it right?

You get what you pay for.

Imagine walking down the street and people yelling at you to buy this or try that or whatever other random comments real life Spam would consist of. Or if you went into a department store to buy something and no one was there to charge you for your purchases. I’d walk out and never go back!

As was recently announced Google’s Postini was shut down preventing many people from getting emails for hours and some for days.

Service support, per Tweets was nil. Which only adds to the irritation because if there is anything worse than having problems with internet and mail it is having problems with trying to resolve those problems!

There are REAL solutions to Spam and the host of other internet related filth out there!

Total Mail Defense (TMD) – not to be confused with Total Male Enhancement – is one of those providers!

I have had great success, uninterrupted, by using this service. There is no “Spam folder” to have to deal with, it is set up for real people who have real lives that don’t need extra work created by a “solution”.

From: UNCC (tmsablan@yahoo.com)
Subject: REFUND PAYMENT FROM UNCC

United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) In Affiliation with Barrack Obama Campaign to Assist Scammed Individuals In The Settlement of Disputes through Trust Credit Bank.

Attention: Beneficiary

I wish to congratulate you for the approval of the compensation payment of $500,000.00 USD by this commission. The United Nation Compensation Commission (UNCC) was created in 1991 as a subsidiary organ of the UN Security Council. Its mandate is to retrieve lost funds through various law agents and also to process claims and pay compensation for losses and damages suffered as a direct result of Internet Fraud.
The UNCC in conjunction with the Barrack Obama Campaign on the 12th of October 2008 organized a confederation meeting which ended 2 weeks later with the UN Secretary General. This meeting was first held on the 8th of April 2003 by the then secretary to the UN. You can view this page for your perusal then do the needful by contacting the paying agent accordingly.
(http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2003/ik344.doc.htm).

This email is directed to all individuals that have been scammed in all parts of the world. In reference to the just concluded meeting, the UNCC in affiliation with Barrack Obama Campaign for Global Economic Crises eradication have agreed to compensate them with categorical payment sum of $500,000.00 each.

Trust Credit Bank(TCB) will handle the transfer of the fund through their Online Transfer System (E-Transfer). Your payment file has been forwarded to them so you should contact the bank today as soon as you receive this letter of notification.

Contact info:

Bank: Trust Credit Bank
Contact Person: Mr. Peter Brown
Temporary Emails: trustcredit@gmail.com or trustcredit1@gmail.com

DO REMEMBER YOUR PAYMENT REFERENCE: BR/FMWH/1001/09 AND IF YOU HAVE IN THE PAST MADE ANY FORM OF PAYMENT FOR THE TRANSFER OF THIS FUNDS, PLEASE DO STATE IT FOR OUR RECORD PURPOSE AS WE HAVE A MANDATE TO REPORT BACK TO THE PRESIDENCY THE PROGRESS OF THIS PAYMENT.

Mrs. Karen B. Magolie
Secretary

I didn’t know it was Spam.

It looked legitimate.

I thought it was from my aunt Gertrude.

I needed to lose weight and it looked promising.

The endless list goes on and on, but the truth is marketing. You were a recipient of well planned marketing. No matter what you think the reason you responded to the Spam was the reality is you were “hooked”!

The subject line or that is was from someone who looked familiar, whatever it was you took hold of the line. That is what marketing does. Good. Bad. Legal. Illegal. All the same, it hooks you.

Would you open the front door of your house to someone who maybe looked like someone you know? NO!

If you start looking at your email as a real life communication channel, like your front door, you would think twice and stay away from the curiosity that is often just bait for bigger troubles!

Often times when there is economic strife people will look for a get rich quick scheme, or buy more Lottery tickets than usual, or look for a great deal on something they are looking to buy.

In today’s economic and electronic times this means more Spam, more Spam, more Spam.

Spammers are predatory in that they don’t care who they solicit or what they solicit. They only care about their own bottom line. Not the American way, certainly not the way of a Republic, but it seems to be the growing trend in today’s modern world, an “all for one, one for none” type of an attitude, which helped with the economic collapse the world is experiencing today.

Recent surveys from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) suggest that 80% of consumers surveyed after visiting a Spam site or responding to a Spam message in the U.S. don’t think that it is possible to get a virus, mal-ware etc., from such a visit.

This “never going to happen to me” attitude is problematic because in fact it likely will happen to anyone clicking through to a dangerous site solicited by Spam.

Further, according to the survey, most people who think that they cannot be infected are the best targets because they don’t pay attention and look for problems in their system and therefore are in a “dangerous” position.

As a note upfront: If you read the entire Snopes page this email links to, you would find at the bottom in reference to this exact email being sent around:

“The virus it references (i.e., the Mail Server Report worm) was a real one, but it’s neither new nor currently rampant (as claimed in the warning text), nor does it manifest itself in the fashion described (since the “symptoms” provided in the warning are merely a reworking of the text of an earlier virus hoax). All in all, that message doesn’t really merit the dire warning to “SEND A COPY OF THIS TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS, And ask the to PASS IT ON IMMEDIATELY!”

The email being sent around:

Subject: Warning - READ IMMEDIATELY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HI ALL THIS was sent to me by our son who is in charge of the computers for the state of Florida — whenever he receives anything like this it is a warning to the State as well as all us little people —

VERY IMPORTANT , PLEASE READ THIS

Anyone-using Internet mail such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and so on.

This information arrived this morning, Direct from both Microsoft and Norton

Please send it to everybody you know who has Access to the Internet.

You may receive an apparently harmless e-mail titled ‘Mail Server Report’

If you open either file, a message will appear on your screen saying: ‘It is too late now, your life is no longer beautiful…’

Subsequently you will LOSE EVERYTHING IN YOUR PC, And the person who sent it to you will gain access to your Name, e-mail and password. This is a new virus which started to circulate on Saturday afternoon. AOL has already confirmed the severity, and the anti virus software’s are not capable of destroying it.

The virus has been created by a hacker who calls himself ‘life owner’.

PLEASE SEND A COPY OF THIS E-MAIL TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS, And ask them to PASS IT ON IMMEDIATELY!

THIS HAS BEEN CONFIRMED BY SNOPES.

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/mailserver.asp

Alan has made public appearances in a variety of media sources, including the Detroit Times, which makes him stand out from the seedy Spammer crowd. Not to defame him, but just to illustrate the defiance he wages, it is not unlike a child molester wearing a T-Shirt declaring himself such, as was the case a few years ago with the guy who declared himself over the net. And while it is appreciated and frankly both should be branded it nonetheless leaves little one can do about it when the crimes are veiled.

According to the Detroit Times, Ralsky pled guilty to various charges relating to Spam and agreed to testify against other Spammers in an effort to truncate his own sentence, which is why his name has come back to the forefront of mainstream media.

For years there has been an ongoing Federal investigation into the crimes of Spammers, including Ralsky, and U.S. Attorney Terrance Berg seems to consider this recent coup to be the modern day Al Capone case in that they always get their man!

Their estimates: "Worldwide, spam will cost us all $130 billion; in the U.S. alone, $42 billion. That’s a 30% increase over our 2007 estimates, which themselves were a 100% increase over our 2005 figures."

They further explain the breakdown of where this is costing money:

• User productivity cost (deleting spam, looking for false positives, etc.): 85%
• Help desk cost (IT helping end users deal with spam): 10%
• Spam control software/hardware/service (licensing fees, amortized capital costs, etc.): 5%

Well with Total Mail Defense making it so you have don’t have to delete spam or look for false positives that reduces that amount by 85%.

I am feeling pretty good about our assistance in helping the economy by reducing the money wasted.

The name "Nigerien Scam" came from one of the original documents which were mailed rather than emailed with postage markings from Nigeria and other African states. When it hit the email scene the name at the end of the email was often African, thus the name "Nigerien Scam" stuck.

This scam has cost people anywhere from thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Should you receive an email about the Nigerian email or 4-1-9 report it to the Better Business Bureau http://www.bbb.org/ and you can also fax a letter to your local representatives office (go on the net and look at the state in which you live dot gov dot org, eg., http://www.ca.gov/ and look up your local representative) informing them that you are a target of such Spam and that you would like legislation enacted prohibiting such offenses.

Even if this email comes from an address that you think you know it is dangerous and should be deleted.

That equaled 99% of all traffic sent through it!  Meaning that our customers servers never had to bear that load and this barrage never slowed down their systems.

With 1% of email making it past our first level of filtering, another 27% were blocked at the next stage.

Through all of this, not one legitimate email was blocked.

This is WAY more than usual amounts of traffic, email spam is definitely not slowing down.