Common Cents: Slam the Spam!

Hello, and welcome to Common Cents, where we discuss topics relevant to those living below the poverty line and other topics that are of importance to those living paycheck to paycheck!

This week we'll be discussing one of the online world's least favorite things, and how to keep it out of your hair. Chances are you've got it in your email inbox right now, and you might even already have some methods of dealing with it. That's right -- this week on Common Cents, we're going to Slam the Spam!


Important businesspeople get paid large amounts of money to figure out exactly how much productivity is lost by a business per year due to spam. It's a simple mathematical formula: $X per hour x Y employees x Z hours per day spent sorting through spam x 208 days per year = the amount you should be glad you're not paying for spam prevention efforts. However, spammers constantly try new and clever methods to disguise themselves and bypass automatic defense methods, whether they be heuristic tracking devices or simple CAPTCHA readers that allow them to make hundreds of posts per hour. Why bother? Because no matter how many people have heard about spam, there's always the chance that one person hasn't gotten the memo and will enter the spammer's rabbit hole of financial divestment.

Although people tend to bend the definition of 'spam' to suit their purposes, its contextual definition is essentially 'unsolicited mail received strictly for business purposes'. If you sign up for a mailing list, or agree to receive mail from a company, or become someone's friend on a social networking site, or join a group, you essentially provide consent for these sources to send you mail, whether of a business or personal nature, and therefore you are 'soliciting' their business. It's a very important distinction, particularly from a legal standpoint, and it leads naturally to our first question...

1) Is it unsolicited? As mentioned above, mail is unsolicited when it arrives without a previous business relationship being established between you and the sender. This means that if you make or accept a friends request to someone on a social networking site, you agree to tolerate whatever messages they might send you; if you subscribe to a newsletter you acknowledge that you might get advertisements in it; if you get a magazine subscription you don't complain about the advertisements it contains.

It is required by law for companies, businesses, social networking systems, and other such to provide a way for you to opt out of these communications. Emails are required to offer an opt-out or unsubscribe option for their newsletter or mailing list; social networking sites allow you to leave the group or un-friend or block communication from the member; most other services provide an address or phone number you can contact to terminate your business relationship.

2) Is it real? There are a few very common spammer email types that are recognizable on sight. Odds are you've seen a few of these yourself, in fact. Here are just a few things that you really shouldn't trust an email about:

-- Stock tips. If you could get rich just by purchasing a stock that some random person on the Internet told you to buy, don't you think there'd be more people supporting their World of Warcraft habit by purchasing 'penny stocks' and then selling them if/when they increase in value? Trust your instincts, trust your broker (if you have a good one), but don't trust what babafett203 has to say regarding your financial portfolio.

-- Looking for love. You shouldn't go into an alley with a stranger you met five seconds ago, and you shouldn't answer emails from someone you've never heard of. Seriously, if you need the gratification that badly, the Internet is full of free pornography and lonely people on message boards and social networking sites without having to settle for whoever sends you an email. In many cases, this is a thinly-disguised ploy to get you to sign up for other services. In a few cases, this is a ploy to rob you outright. Either way, you probably aren't going to find love via random solicitations, and you're probably going to end up paying for it.

-- Bank routing. Whether it's the Nigerian Finance Minister or a lowly bank clerk somewhere, if they're looking to loot the account of a recently deceased person and don't want anyone to know about it, why would they contact you? Unless you happen to be a professional money launderer, you are not the person to handle this sort of transaction. Usually, this is just a scam to loot YOUR account -- and even if it weren't, don't you think your bank would notice if someone deposited fifty million dollars in your account, even for thirty minutes? There would be questions, and you'd be the one facing any legal troubles that developed. If you ARE a professional money launderer, you should know better than to trust unfamiliar and unsolicited sources anyhow, or you'll have a very, very short career.

-- Congratulations! You won something. You didn't enter a contest, and you didn't do anything to deserve it, but the Microsoft Lottery (or the UK Electronic Lottery, or whathaveyou) says you've won ten million dollars! This is a variation on the aforementioned bank routing scam; it's setting you up for a fall, whether in the direct form of obtaining your banking and personal information in order to loot your bank account, or in the less direct form of charging you 'transactional fees' to receive your never-appearing rewards. Either way, regardless of how often you pray, your email will probably never contain a legitimate source of millions of dollars from somewhere you've never heard of. (You probably won't win from Publisher's Clearing House, either, but at least they just want to sell you magazines.)

-- Buy our stuff! This is a direct attempt to convince you to make a purchase, whether for Viagra or printer ribbons. The more reputable companies include a way to opt out of future advertisements; anyone who doesn't should go to the bottom of the spam bucket immediately. Just remember, if it was really their best deal, would they waste money advertising it instead of advertising something that offers a higher profit margin?

-- Work from Home / Check Cashing Schemes. This one's a dangerous newcomer, and it works well because it sounds so legitimate. There are a few legitimate work-from-home jobs out there; what we're talking about is 'accounts-payable' work-from-home opportunities. Generally, this involves receiving an offer to handle checks for a company - or this might be the scammy portion of one of the aforementioned schemes. Either way, most of these checks are bad; if you try to deposit them, you'll likely discover several days later that they're worthless, and you'll be expected to make up any discrepancies. This might be difficult if your $2,000 is currently in the mail on its way to the scammer. Any work-from-home opportunity that asks you to 'be the banker' is only looking to rob your 'bank'.

3) Is it worth my time? Probably not. Most e-mail services have a spam-catching feature that stops the worst offenders from getting through, and practically all e-mail services, social networking systems, message boards, and so forth have methods of reporting spammers (and, in the case of accountholders, having them removed from the system.) If you're receiving unsolicited mail, especially if it's an obvious scam, report it! (Even 'solicited' mail may be reportable, if it's an obvious scam attempt, so if you see something that matches something on the above list, you might want to report it anyhow.)

Some people take this a step further, actively working to find out more about spammers' activities, habits, contact addresses, and such before turning them in. A few even take great pleasure in actively baiting spammers and scammers into doing ridiculous things, like re-enacting a Monty Python sketch. This occupation is outside the scope of this article, but I recommend you check here or here or check out the Wikipedia article on the subject of scambaiting.

Spam costs us billions of dollars in lost productivity - at least that's what the spam-prevention-software salesmen tell us as they rake in billions of dollars in software sales. In the end, all you really need to do to slam the spam is to know a basic fact of the Internet - nothing is ever entirely as it appears, nobody is that generous, and you should treat messages from strangers on the Internet with the same cautious regard you give to possible telemarketers on the telephone. Throw it out, opt out where you can, report it where you can't opt out of it, and don't be fooled.


Austin Cushing, Money Correspondent:
Austin's column, Common Cents, published on Tuesdays to Gather Essentials: Money, is focused on life below the poverty line and other topics that are of importance to those living paycheck to paycheck.

Austin Cushing is an eccentric writer, consultant, programmer, poet, photographer, and Microsoft-certified database administrator. He writes from personal experience and personal opinion, and enjoys finding the humor in even the darkest aspects of the world. In addition to his column, he maintains Gather groups on a diverse range of topics, from gaming to political discourse.

You can find all of Austin's Common Cents columns at http://commoncents.gather.com. Keep up with Austin's other postings and Gather activity by joining his Gather network -- just click here and select the orange "Connect" button on the left-hand side of the page.

Food for Thought:
Have you ever considered trying to outscam a spammer?
If so, have you tried it?
If so, did it work?