Part of the junk mail that gets sent over the Internet as a form of spam is scam mail. What usually distinguishes ordinary spam and scams is the way they work.
Usually the payload of ordinary spam is a web site. The aim of the spam is to encourage the receiver to visit the web site. Once there, you find an attempt to get you to buy a product ot service, the most frequent being pharmaceuticals, with fake luxury goods coming a close second.
But with scams, the aim is to separate the victims from their money via outright fraud. Scams fall into different categories; the most prevalent is the advance fee fraud, followed by romance, rentals, employment and lotteries. Unlike the ordinary spam, the aim of the scam is to encourage the victim to reply via email. The payload in this case is an email address instead of a web site.
An effective way to combat spam is to lodge a complaint with the domain name service provider for the web site, and have the domain suspended. This shuts down the web site and renders the spam ineffective. Reporting spammed websites can be a labor-intensive process, but there are tools that help automate this process.
Effective ways to combat scams -
1.Warn potential victims that the email they have received is a fraud
2. Report the email address to the service provider and have it suspended
1. There are many sites that accept submissions of scam emails. One such site is at scamwarners.com. This site is fully indexed by Google with a one-hour turnaround. Potential victims who receive a suspicious offer to get rich quick, need only do a Google search on the email address, and up comes the same email on a site called Scam Warners.
2. Similarly, email service providers, conscious of their image and responsibilities, are quick to act. They will suspend customer accounts being used for fraud, as provided in their terms of service. So even if a potential victim does make the mistake of replying to a scam, all they will receive is a message delivery failure notification in return. And the scammer will not even know whose response they missed. Although reporting of scammer email addresses is also labor-intensive, automated processes make this a viable option too.
Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2012 8:37 pm 
