I make an appearance on the excellent Breakfast Club show on Radio Australia each Friday at about 01:15 GMT and some listeners have asked me post links to the stuff I talk about, so here they are. Texting reduces obesity If your kids are getting a little overweight, then treat them to a bit of… 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 »
I like the idea of this: Using ordinary folk to monitor elections, via SMS from their cellphone. And it seems to have worked. Nigeria used a system called FrontlineSMS, developed by UK-based kiwanja.net to keep track of all of the texts. Some 54 trained associates recruited volunteers to invite as many people as possible via… Read More »
Great piece in The New Yorker by Mitchell Zuckoff (thanks, John) about a 419 Nigerian email scam that dates back to 2001 involving an ordained minister, John W. Worley. You think you know how these scams work but read on. These people are much more sophisticated and tenacious than the spam you receive. Also, the… Read More »
You don’t have to be dumb to fall for Nigerian email scams. According to a suit filed by a renowned psychiatrist’s son, Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk lost perhaps $3 million over 10 years to scammers from Nigeria. As the LA Times puts it: The court documents, filed last month in Orange County Superior Court, allege… Read More »