Spam Fraud: How unsuspecting users can become part of a fraud
The internet is plagued by spam. These unsolicited emails promise to solve one or the other of your major concerns by promoting products and services of a website. Some companies are known to offer online sellers the service of distributing such emails to millions of net users.
Alternatively, they offer to sell the retailers a million email addresses to which they can send their promotional emails. These companies claim that they get the emails legally. They say the owners of the email addresses had opted in to receive such messages.
Actually, the addresses were obtained illegally.
The addresses were acquired by illegally accessing computers of online users and taking out all the information, without their having an inkling to it. The individuals behind such companies arrange to clandestinely download spyware or such software onto your computers. These malwares make a note of and send such critical information as passwords, email addresses and credit card numbers to the fraudsters.
The download happens when you per chance click on a link inside a spam mail sent by these fraudsters. It can also happen while visiting a scam website or when you are downloading something from a shady website (known in either case as a drive-by operation).
The fraudsters do not stop there. The downloaded malware also allows your computer to be handled by them from a remote location. This enables them to use your computer to perform such tasks like sending out spam emails on their behalf.
But, you are not alone. A recent statistic revealed that 40% of the 800 million or so computers online daily are zombie terminals or bots as the infected computers are called. They become part of a network of such computers called a botnet.
The companies who claim to be able to send mails to millions of computers are using such networks to provide their service. They use the computers and email addresses of ordinary net users to carry out their scam.
One such fraudster, Robert Alan Soloway, whom the Police go as far as to call The Spam King, was arrested last summer and confessed to fraud on March 17. He was providing this service to anybody who was interested through his company, The Newport Internet Marketing Corporation ( NIM ). For a fee of $495, he was committing his clients to send promotional emails to 20 million email addresses within 15 days!
You can be warned when your computer becomes part of such a network. If out of the blue you receive emails from strangers claiming that they had received spam from your email id or if you notice some mails in your Sent folder that you have no recollection of ever sending, then these are signs that your computer has been taken.
You can avoid this by taking some precautions as recommended by the government website FTC (a PDF File).
Related posts:
- Stop Spam-Tips to help reduce and stop spam
- US Court puts a lid on Two Scareware Scams
- Tips to reduce Unwanted Spam!
- Biggest Internet Fraud – FBI Cracks ‘Scareware’ Gang ,Three Charged
- Scam emails armed with Trojans on the prowl
