Email Fraud

Fraud has existed perhaps as long or longer than money. Any new sociological change can engender new forms of fraud, or other crime. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used to defraud people by way of Email fraud. Email fraud can take the form of a "con game" or scam. A free ware outlook spam filter can help curb these emails. Confidence tricks tend to exploit the inherent greed and dishonesty of their victims: the prospect of a 'bargain' or 'something for nothing' can be tempting. Email fraud, as with other 'bunco schemes' relies on naive people who put their confidence in get-rich-quick schemes such as 'too good to be true' investments or offers to sell popular items at 'impossibly low' prices. Many people have lost their life savings due to fraud and a spam inspector for outlook is needed.

Forms of email fraud

Spoofing

Email sent from someone pretending to be someone else is known as spoofing, even from spoofed domains. Spoofing may take place in many ways. Common to all them is that the actual sender's name and the origin of the message are hid or masked from the recipient. Many, if not most, instances of email fraud use at least little spoofing, as most frauds are clearly criminal acts. Criminals typically try to avoid easy traceability, but you can create a spam black list for outlook for known spammers.

Fishing for data

Some spoof messages pretend to be from an existing company, perhaps one with which the intended victim already has a business relationship, such as Internet Service Providers. The 'bait' in this instance may appear a message from 'the fraud department' of, for example, the victim's bank, which asks the customer to: "confirm their information"; "log in to their account"; "create a new password", or similar requests. If the 'fish' takes the 'bait', they are 'hooked' -- their account information is now in the hands of the con man, to do with as they wish. See phishing.

Bogus offers

Email solicitations to buy goods or services may be instances of attempted fraud. The fraudulent offer typically features a popular item or service, at a drastically cut price, an example is direct marketing. Using an outlook spam plugin helps catch these fraudulent emails.

Items may be offered in advance of their actual availability, for instance, the latest video game may be offered ahead of its release, but at a similar price to a normal sale. Here, the 'greed factor' is the wish to get something that nobody else has, and before everyone else can get it, instead than a cut in price. The item is never delivered, as it was not a legitimate offer in the first place.

Such an offer may even be no more than an attempt to get the victim's credit card information, with the intent of using the information to fraudulently receive goods or services, paid for by the hapless victim, who may not know they were scammed until their credit card has been "used up", unless using an anti spam program for outlook express.

Requests for help

The 'request for help' email fraud takes this form. An email is sent asking help in some way, but including a 'hook' such as a large amount of money, a treasure, or some artifact of supposedly great value.

This scam has existed at least since the Renaissance, as the 'Spanish Prisoner/Turkish Prisoner scam. This scheme, in its original form, has the con man in correspondence with a rich person who has been imprisoned under a false identity, and is relying on the confidence artist to raise money to secure his release. The victim is 'allowed' to send money, expecting a generous reward when the prisoner returns. The confidence artist claims to have chosen the mark, (victim) for their reputation for honesty.

This confidence trick is similar to the face-to-face con, known as the Stranger With a Kind Face which is the likely origin of the vaudevillian routine known as The Stranger With a Kind Face, a.k.a. "Niagara Falls", a.k.a. "Slowly I turned..."

The modern email version of this scam, known variously as the "Nigerian scam", "Nigerian All-Stars" and so forth., is an Advance fee fraud. The lottery scam is a contemporary twist on this scam. Most outlook spam guards can stop these.

Avoiding email fraud - How to block spam using outlook express

Email fraud may be avoided by:

• keeping one's email address as secret as possible
  
• ignoring unsolicited emails of all types, simply deleting them.
  
• not giving in to greed, since greed is the element that allows one to be 'hooked'.
  
• if you have been defrauded, report it to law enforcement authorities -- many frauds go unreported, due to shame, guilty feelings or embarrassment.

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