Two Can Play the Game; Scamming the Scammers

The best way to strengthen a society and increase development, they say, is to improve health, education and other services for its citizens. Over the years the government and people of many nations have sort to ensure that these necessities are met by employing the most up to date advances and trends in science and technology. This has helped to foster and develop a better place for all men. However, these innovations and scientific developments have also come with a cost; a price manifested in negative effects such as fraud.

 Last week, my piece –Cybercrimes; Scamming the Scammers – elaborated on the common email scams and how to tell a scam email. This follow up will focus on; what to do when you receive a scam email.

 What to do when you receive a scam email;

This is often the difficulty faced by many recipients of scam emails. Firstly, they are uncertain what to do or think of it, others are too ignorant of what is going on, some are eaten up by greed and fall prey to hoax. The best thing to do is simply delete such emails as soon as possible. But first copy the email address of the sender, open the mail or settings option of your email provider and paste in it there as spam. Henceforth you will no longer receive emails from that address again as it has been blocked. If this too complicated, simply deleting the mail could be a good option. This in effect will prevent the scammer using that address to email you again. Secondly, never reply to the said address, because many people are often tempted to reply the scam sender with a nasty email. The downside is that your email address will remain in their pool and can be used over and over again.

 How to avoid receiving scam emails;

Like all con artists scammers have over time perfected their trade. The email addresses are more up to date and newer methods of deception like building and hosting clone websites have been devised. In truth, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell a scam. Recently I came across a “cloned” Interswitch Nigeria site and had to look very closely to be able to tell the difference from the genuine site.

 So how can one avoid receiving such emails? Here are a few tips. One, never leave or openly display your email address on any website where others can see e.g. on online forums and websites where others post comments or opinions. Secondly, do not indulge in the habit of forwarding emails from known and unknown sources when asked to. A good example are the emails friends and relations forward asking you send to others claiming it’s a prayer or some religious or miraculous manifestation promising you divine favor from God. No offence to the religious types out there, but this is a source of countless number of email addresses for scammers and internet fraudsters. These emails are created by scammers to gather email addresses of unsuspecting internet users to be used for nefarious intensions.

 In summary, I will like to state that though these steps cannot guarantee that one will not receive scam emails, they will at least minimize your chances. The internet is a very useful innovation; we cannot let fraudsters use it as a tool to cause havoc.