There are many email scams which are out to get your money from you. This includes online gambling, the selling of prescription medicines, the cheapest mortgage rates, and other advertisements.

For example, one well known scam is known as the “Nigerian bank” scam. The person sending you this email claims that they are the wife or another relative of an official of the Nigerian government or a former dictator. They will tell a woeful story of how millions of dollars were put into a bank account that they can no longer access. If you help them they will share some of this money with you. All you need to do is give them a few thousand dollars from your own bank account to help with expenses. As crazy as this may be many people will fall victim to this scam. A Czech man lost his entire life savings to the scam and ended up shooting the Nigerian consul in the city of Prague.

There are some scams on the Internet that will promise you big paybacks in investment opportunities. These scams say that they are free of risk but when you give them your money you most likely won’t see any of it again. Yet another scam will offer you a credit card if you have a credit rating that is bad. All you need to do is send them the fees for processing and a security deposit. You end up getting nothing in return and by the time you look into the scam they will have disappeared.

MLMs (multilevel marketing schemes) are another scam on the Internet. You will be encouraged to buy big quantities of what is considered to be the “latest new product”. You can then resell this product for easy and fast profits while at the same time getting a commission for each sale. However, once you have the product in hand, the distributor who sold it to you will be long gone, many times without sending you the product.

These types of Internet offers are much worse than common spams. Keep in mind that businesses that are legitimate won’t try to promote what they sell through the use of spam. They will usually email targeted groups of people, most often those people who have volunteered their interest. You should ignore any other offers that you get by using your delete button. Many times the simple process of highlighting a spam email to delete it can send out a message to the sender that you’ve received it. “Fighting Spam” in this series can help you battle this problem.

You should never reply to any spam that you receive. If you do this it will let the spammer know that the email address they have for you is a valid one and you’ll end up getting more spam than ever. There is some spam that will have a message that lets you remove your address from the spammers mailing list. Don’t bother using this service since it is just another way that the spammer will verify your email address.

Never, under any circumstances, give out your banking details, number for your credit card, or other personal information to anyone on the Internet who you don’t know. Legitimate businesses, such as PayPay, won’t ask you in an email what your password is. A popular scam is to use a return address that is fake and then create content and subject lines to make the email message seem as though it is coming from a banking institution that is confirming your personal information. Make sure that you don’t fall for these tricks.

But how do you know what is spam and what isn’t? What some people consider to be spam another person will think is just advertisement, therefore the answer isn’t simple. One good way to determine if something is spam is if you don’t recognize who is sending you the email. If you don’t know the sender then you likely won’t want to hear from them. For example, just how many Nigerian dictators do you know?

[tags]spam,phishing,scams,privacy,internet security[/tags]