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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Funny Nigerian Scam Shirt


On a silly note I found this shirt on the Nigerian scam.



Other scams like the nigerian scams are not uncommon such as the lottery scam from Great Brittan, or the newest one is a military personal from IRAQ that needs his money cashed for a reward.

When you see these always hit delete.

Craigslist and The Rich Jeerk Tactics

If you followed my last blog about craigslist classifieds, you would of read how spammers are now in the craigslist arena.

The good news with craigslist is that the classified community for the most part police's itself meaning anyone can block out ads that are not legit. The problem comes when you respond to an advertisment such as an inquiry for a car only to recieve an email from an auto reponse account telling you that he or she has already sold the car but would like to extend you an offer to go to another site to buy a car.

A video a while back from the infamous Rich jerrk had this tactic on one of his sites telling people on how to drive traffic to a site using black hat tricks(this is an unethical way to get people to go to a site)

The techniques goes with the user looking for an affiliate program in click bank for dog training.
The user then gets the affiliate link and creates an email similar to what I mentioned telling the responder that the dog has already been sold or given away but please go to so and so website on dog training.

The good news is that this tactic has slowed somewhat on the craigslist site but it hard to detect if you responded to more then one classified.

Just remember when responding to classifieds, use another email account unless you want your primary account full of spam.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Careerbuilder becoming spamish phishers

Today I received an email from Careerbuilder(at one time a reputable source for decent jobs) It seems like Careerbuilder does not screen companies that want to hire people for real jobs. This is an exert of what I recieved in my email.

This is what I got in my email. It goes longer but I cut it for blog reasons. Seems like scammers are trying a new way to sucker people to accept money.

The letter starts of Dear Madam or sir

Then the letter goes on talking about how they have a company in Switterland and how they need someone to take a certain amount of money and in return you get a portion of the transfer.

These type of money making schemes are used to prevent themselves for being caught and put the blame on someone else.

Anyway if you get this from Careerbuilder just hit the delete key. I wish careerbuilder would monitor such activity.



Peer to Peer File Sharing

As you know p2p has been around since the begining of napster which popularized pirating music. As you know napster is no longer what it use to be but other hybrids of file sharing have popped up online from Bearshare, Limewire,Imesh, and ares. I won't get into the details of why its wrong to do it but I will say if you plan to use a peer to peer program to download music, files,movies, use a computer that is not used for logining into your email, or you bank accounts.

You can find some good p2p programs on download.com. The best part is that people place reviews on the use of them. I would stay away from just googling the p2p names I mentioned only because there are sites that can post as a clone p2p site and install some mean spyware thats hard to get off your computer.

The main lesson is if you plan to use a p2p don't use your own personal machine that has valuable pictures, or important information.

Also buy yourself an inexpensive hard drive at tiger direct.Western Digital WDH1B5000N MyBook Office 500GB HD Im recommend this site because for 1 they are inexpense and they deliver in a timely manner. External hard drives is just a simple way to back up your memories and important documents

Patch your PC computer

If your a pc user then this blog is a little reminder to always make sure your pc has the latest security patch. This can easily be done by going to your windows explorer browser and click on update windows.

Or you can go to the windows website and download the windows security patches their as well.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Mylot Review

If you have heard of mylot then your not alone. About two years ago I heard about this site from a friend of mine and told me to check it out. The site is like a yahoo answers forum where people share ideas or ask questions and people give their advice or opinion.

Unlike yahoo answers the site pays you for participating in online discussions or referring people to the site. So I tried the site out and woo hoo I made about 12 dollars. It didnt come easy. I posted like crazy so if you did your math correctly it was more or less around .01 per hour or so lol. Anyway I continued to use the site but the payouts were very very small.

Is the site a scam? Not hardly but if you plan to make a living off the site you may want to try other forms of online money making like writing articles or creating custom graphics or something like that if you do want to make money online.

The moral of this review is if you think a site such as mylot or squidoo will make you a confortable living. You may want to think again.

Tomorrow I will talk about squidoo so if your wondering what squidoo is google it and check it out for yourself.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Wi Fi Safety Tips

I found this article on CNET. The article has some pretty good wi fi tips on how to protect yourself when you use public wi fi hot spots. Just because you have a firewall doesnt mean your fully protected.

The last thing you want is someone stealing your data while you surf the net in a public place.

Check it out

http://reviews.cnet.com/9602-12576_7-0.html?messageID=2510978&tag=nl.e410

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Resetting your password

A week ago a company we work with did what most IT managers would call a big no no.

This company we had been working with needed to reset the password to our email back up log. They sent me the reset password only to find out that their programmer had set the password to password. How dumb is that right?

Anyway speaking of passwords one way hackers can access hints to what your hint question and answer maybe is looking to see if you have a myspace or any other web 2.0 profile.

Just be aware that any information online is fair game. Stay safe.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Credit Card Shaving Scam

This was an interesting article I found on yahoo news. This article talks about how scam artist will go through a list of 16 numbers to find one that matches. Then the scam artist uses a low tech way to accomplish the use of the 16 numbers.

Check out the article.

Credit Card Shaving

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

809 scam

This is a telephone scam called the 809 scam. The way this scam works is you will recieve a telephone call such as 809-222-0000 or something like that. What the scam artist is trying to retrieve is for you to call back the number. This in turn charges your phone a certain amount to call that number. It sort of like calling a 900 number when you get charged a certain amount per min.

Only difference is you wont be getting a tarot card reading lol. So beware of this scam.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Craigslist Spammers beware

Hello and thanks for visiting my blog. Lately I have inquired about a few items I wanted to buy from craigslist but instead i got a message telling me oops sorry we ran out but you can check out so and so.

It seems that craigslist has become a play ground for spam artist to solicit their websites.

Then a few days later I get more messages from the same email address with more offers.

Lesson learned. I still love craigslist but now I play it smarter. I had to create another account just for my inquires. Hopefully it will stop.

Most of these spam like messages will never address what side of town they are located. So if the location looks similar or the message has many typo's. chances are spammers are using bot programs to create these emails.

Also help the craigslist community by clicking on the spam option if you feel that the email is not a real message by a person. This helps everyone and eventually stops some of the spam like messages that appear on there.

Monday, September 08, 2008

New Browser - Chrome from Google

If your heard the latest on google. Google has released a new browser that will make surfing the next much safer. What I like about the browser is that if you happen to visit a site with phishing capabilities the browser will pop up a window telling you the site may have malware.

A really cool feature to keep sites from infecting your computer.

Worth looking at.

http://www.google.com/chrome

Friday, September 05, 2008

CNN link scam

Our IT manager where I work informed us that an email posing as a CNN report has been circulating the spam box. If you see a cnn report to your email just delete it. The link has web site injection. If your not familiar with this term its a way a site gets a browser to click the link and then directed to a page that asks a person to download a program(which is a virus)

Remember always update your antivirus.