Joe's Security

Ever had a long lost, rich relative in Africa?

Maybe you've been the winner of a "global" lottery that your email address just found its way into! 

And those lucrative "representative" opportunities. Who doesn't  want to make thousands for doing next to nothing?

We've all gotten them. Those pesky, unsolicited emails that find their way into our inbox. In one way or another they all boil down to the same thing:

More money! And usually tons of it - hundreds, thousands or even millions of euros, dollars or pounds. 

Holy smokes! If I were to believe my inbox, it's just raining money "out there!"

Unfortunately, many do fall into these temptations. Because of greed, desperation or just lacking plain, old common sense, they respond and get bilked out of cash - and sometimes lots of it. If you ever wondered why these things keep on coming, well that's why. Too often, they work! The perpetrators make mountains of money.

PT Barnum was right, there really is "a sucker born every day."

So in our mission to make the Internet a safer place, gathered here is Joe's email scam "Hall of Shame." These have been gathered from a myriad of places - all are REAL. Only any idetifiable recipient information has been stripped. 

• All scams try to accomplish just a couple of things:
• Mostly get cash and/or financial info from the victim.
• Get the victim to do something illegal, like cash a forged check and send the cash to the scammer.
• Extortion by compromising a business computer or system so to access lots of sensitive information. The perpetrator then "offers" to return to the business the stolen or compromised data for a "fee."
• Infecting your system in a Botnet, to become just another drone.

These scams are the real thing, and sorted into a taxonomy of sorts - hopefully to make discussing and searching them a little easier.

Categories:

Nigerian and Derivative Scams

Phishing for Financial Information Scams

Loan "Offer" & Business Proposal Scams

You've Supposedly Won "Something" Scams

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