Further to my earlier piece about the scamming potential of Web 2.0, here are a couple more examples of why social engineering is a bigger problem than it might appear. First off, governments and organisations are not as careful with your information as you might expect them to. There are plenty of examples of CD-ROMs… Read More »
A few weeks back I wrote about love scams (“You Give Love a Bad Name,” WSJ.com) — how scammers are trawling online dating sites looking for suckers. What interested me about the scam is that in some cases the scammers play a very patient game — luring the mark in over a period of months… Read More »
Good grammar is important, whether you’re pitching a story to a journalist or a scam to a dupe. Here are two examples: how not to and how to. First off, a PR pitch that endangers its credibility with an error in the subject line: And now, here’s an example of getting it right: A scam that not only… Read More »
(This is the text of my weekly Loose Wire Service column, syndicated to newspapers like The Jakarta Post. My thanks to Joe Wein for the information that made this column possible.) A lot of people think that online scams happen to other people, but they don’t. They could happen to you. Or a relative, new… Read More »
You got to give scammers credit where credit is due. This latest wave of e-card spam at least exhibits some imagination on the part of the sender: At first it was from a friend, then a colleague, then a classmate; now it’s neighbors and worshippers sending you ecards. Good on them. I must confess I don’t… Read More »