Technology have catch a drastic pace in past 15 years, and one of the benefit of these technological developments is world become a Global Village.
By Ahmad Ladhani
Communication between people in distinct race and language become possible. People become more informed and hence this liberation of communication makes them free from seclusion, but this freedom of advancement also has a price to pay in form of scams.
Now day’s Electronic Mail or simply email is the most significant part of our life and hence email scams are flourished healthily. Email scams or spams normally look like an ordinary email contains proposals, invitations of monetary benefits. Scammers use email, online ads, pop ups, and search results to trick you into sending them money and personal information. The emails include advance-fee scams, charity scams, compensation scams, fake job offer scams, FBI scams, fraud recovery scams, investment scams, loan scams, lottery scams, malware scams, phishing scams, romance scams, secret shopper scams etc.
The Email Service providers feel the same and make necessary improvements in the account’s security measures by putting advance Spam Guard or SSL. People affected with those emails somehow, believing them true. It’s not their fault as the format and the return address seems to be accurate making them believing those scam mails.
Below is the example of the scammed email which I have found in my Junk mail box. I deliberately remove my email address and the timings of the email.
________________________________________________________________
From: BMTChemicals CC (info@bmtchem.co.za)
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 0:00:00 AM/PM
To: xyz@abc.com
Dear Sir/Madam,
I’M Goodman Chambers, the Sales Manager of (BMTChemicals CC), the major producer of Chemicals products in South Africa.
We are looking for a trustworthy representative in Pakistan that can help as a link between our company and our client over there.we would like to know if you are interested to work from home for us and earn up to 2,000 to 3,500 usd. weekly for your services.
(BMTChemicals CC) needs a book-keeper or representative in Pakistan,so we want to know if you will like to work from home and get paid weekly without leaving or affecting your present job?
Our company produces Chemical materials, batiks, assorted fabrics and traditional costumes.We have clients we supply goods weekly in Pakistan and our clients make payments for our supplies every week in form of money orders and Bank Transfar which are not cashable here in South Africa, so we need someone in Pakistan to work as our representative to assist us in processing payments from our clients and we will pay him/her weekly wage.
All you need to do is to receive this payment from our clients in Pakistan on behalf of our company and get it cashed at your bank then deduct your 10% and forward the balance to our company here in South Africa.
BELOW IS A LETTER OF EMPLOYMENT FORM OF OUR COMPANY WHICH YOU HAVE TO REPLY AS SOON AS WE CONFIRM ANY PAYMENT COMING TO YOU, I WILL LET YOU KNOW AND I WILL GIVE YOU THE NECESSARY INFORMATION NEEDED FOR THE TRANSFER OF THE COMPANY BALANCE.YOU COULD JUST FILL IT OUT THIS FORM BELOW.
APPLICATION FORM
1.Full Names:—————–
2.House Address:—————–
3.City:—————–
4.Phone Number:—————–
5.Country: —————–
6.Occupation: —————–
7.Age: —————–
Thank you as we await your further response.
In Trust And Good Faith
Goodman Chambers,
BMTChemicals CC
http://www.bmtchem.co.za
22 Venda Rd
Sebenza
Johanneburg
Gauteng.
________________________________________________________________
The email address and the format of the email is so decent and professional look alike but the email is scammed. Following are some measures to check whether the email is scammed or not.
- The easiest way to fight spam or scammed emails to ignore them. Spam will end when it is no longer profitable. Spammers will see their profits tumble if nobody buys from them (because you don’t even see the junk emails). But its usually not work for some people because they don’t set their junk email filter on to exclusive, resulting their mostly emails goes to the junk folder and they have to navigate the folder in order to check them.
- Another way is to report the spammer to their ISP. Finding their true ISP address is not easy as they usually hide them. Fortunately, there are tools like SpamCop that make reporting spam correctly to the right address easy.
- We can identify the scammed mail through the email Header and their Body of the Mail. Usually the ‘from:’ line has set to be the sender’s address. This makes sure you know who the message is from and can reply easily, but spammer knows that the receiver of the email will contact him/her so they usually hide their email address and use fictitious email address.
- So the header method wont worked but the headers of every email message also contains Received: lines in which we can figure out the IP address of the email sender. Normally when a message being forwarded or send through a server, it adds the IP address and server name of the machine from which the message being sent in the received line.
- We can Google the part of the text/email like a line or two, to check the results and see whether this email ever being reported or not. This ensures that the email is forged or not.
Hope these measures help you figuring out the scammed mail and not become the victim of fraudulent acts of scammers.
Informatics 