Scam Is a Four Letter Word Posted June 1, 2001 A few weeks back, I got a ha-ha in the email. It was a notification: You have just received an Amish computer virus. Since we have no electricity and no computers, you are on the honor system. Please delete your hard drive. Ha-Ha. Well, it was ha-ha until this past week when people actually did start deleting files at the behest of an email. I guess it was kind of a "poor man's virus," probably sent out by some wannabee geek who wasn't savvy enough to create the real thing. The file in question was sulfnbk.exe, (a Windows file that allows for the creation of long file names). The message said it contained a virus no anti-virus software could detect, and on June 1, it would blossom into life and destroy your hard drive IF you did not delete the file. I received this virus warning from several people, at least one of whom is known to have a college degree. Hoaxes and spam are computer junk mail. Just like the stuff you get in your real mailbox, they eat up time and resources and, thus, end up costing us all money. Theoretically that is. I'm not saying that if all hoaxes, spam, and junk mail miraculously stopped, the savings gleaned would be passed along. I doubt they would. On the other hand, if you are a business owner and the sales department is obsessing over computer viruses instead of selling, you might have cause to be perturbed. The virus hoaxes I get. I imagine they are formulated by poor suckers trying to claim their fifteen minutes of fame. Perhaps the joy is in perpetrating a hoax that is successful enough to be talked about by David Coursey or listed on vmyths.com. One of the hallmarks of a hoax is the injunction to send the thing to everyone in your address book. The spam is another story. Lots of it comes with clever titles that suck you into opening it because it might be from someone you know. Now, I can't imagine anyone forking over a credit card number to someone who got them to open the email on false pretenses, but there must be people who do because the spam keeps coming. Because of my name, many of these spammers assume I am a male, so I'm always getting emails from "nasty little girls who want to take off their panties" and people who figure I might need to enlarge my penis. Right! Then there are those who urge me to part with $59.95 so I can spy on my neighbors. Not that legitimate businesses don't use spam. They do. The Dish Network, for example. Dish is a reputable company in competition with RCA's Direct TV for the satellite TV market. If you call the 800 number listed in the email, you will speak to a very knowledgeable marketing person who will tell you everything you want to hear in order to sell you the package. You will not be speaking to Dish, however, but to a generic telemarketing company. You will not at first be aware of this because the phone will be answered with the company name. Later, when you find out, for example, that you in fact DO need your landlord's written permission to install a satellite dish, and you call back to cancel your order, the phone will be answered with a different name, and it will be unceremoniously slammed down in your ear when the person on the other end understands the nature of your call. You will not be allowed to talk to a supervisor, you will not be given a phone number where you can cancel your order, and if you call Dish, they will tell you that many companies market their product and they can't help you. The Internet is rife with people trying to take advantage of other people. There are the bogus poetry contests. Enter and you will receive a letter telling you that because of your great talent, you are a semi-finalist. What have you won? The right to buy a "beautifully bound" anthology easily worth $100 for the bargain price of $49.99 -- a small fee for the thrill of seeing your name in print and getting to tout yourself as a published poet, no? The truth about these "anthology" contests is that you can copy three or four inches of text from the dictionary and still be a "talented semi-finalist." With the burgeoning of home computers, everyone wants to be a writer, and there are plenty of people willing and eager to exploit that. A while ago, I got an email from a former client accusing me of defrauding her. She had gone on the Internet in search of an agent to represent her novel. The ABACUS Group responded with a long, rambling letter telling her, among other things, that her book was "no doubt movie material." The problem was the editing. They said -- not once, but twice -- that if she'd paid to have a professional edit, she should demand her money back, and they would do it as it should be done. Then they re-edited a paragraph to demonstrate their skill. Here is the first sentence of their edit: Sarah glanced up from her book, as she heard Paul's car pull into the driveway, she glanced at the clock, 10:00 p.m. Just a tad run on, yes? They changed another sentence to read: Not an unreasonable request, the words haunting her most of the day. The client didn't notice that what they had done to her paragraph would have earned a fifth grader no more than a D plus. ABACUS has a classy-looking web site that led her to believe they were, as they claimed, a "top notch literary agency." It took me two emails to calm her down. The thing is, she should have known. Just as the people who blithely deleted sulfnbk.exe from their hard drives should have known. We live in a country where all but a handful of people go through twelve years of school. A discerning populace is one of the requirements for a successful democracy. If we can't see our way through such blatant computer scams, what would happen if we lived in a country where people we were familiar with -- elected officials, say -- went on television and lied to our faces about the benefits of a tax cut, the energy situation, or the war on drugs? A scary thought, huh? Good thing it can't happen here. |
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