how to combat Fraudulent E-mails

Once again this week I will take the time to answer my readers computer related questions that I have recently received.

I received an e-mail from Mr. Ijeh Ben in Lagos, Nigeria; I expect you can guess the rest! There was a great complicated story about releasing funds and requesting my bank details and a number of times the confidentiality aspect was stressed. I am puzzled as to where this person found my e-mail address as I rarely give it to anyone and what I would be interested to know is if there is anyone I could report this to or just notify. Perhaps it's just one of those things best left ignored as I have done a virus check which is okay.
Joyce Large, Paignton.

These e-mails never cease to amaze me - I receive on average one of these per day and for my readers benefit I will give summarise one that arrived this morning. It essentially said that the guy writing to me was the manager of a foreign bank although the straight giveaway is that it was being sent from one of the free e-mail services such as Hotmail - something I don´t think you´d see the manager of Barclays doing somehow. The guy continues to say that he recently discovered an abandoned sum of 8.5 million dollars which he was expecting to be claimed by a next of kin but they never showed up and so in order for the money to not be claimed it has to be transferred into a foreign bank account. Once there, he will take 75% back and I would get to keep 25% for my trouble which equates to approximately 2.2 million dollars, just for allowing him to use my bank account. It seems very convenient that I could make that much money from a days work and since I receive one of these a day that means that by working a five day week I could make 11 million dollars every single week.
The fact that people actually believe this takes my breath away - How could you possibly believe that a guy who doesn´t even know your name could be offering to transfer 8 and a half million dollars into your personal bank account? People do however which is why the fraudsters continue to do it.

Anyway, I digress as obviously you haven´t fallen for the scam but unfortunately there is very little you can do to report the e-mail address in order to stop them doing it again because as I said they use free e-mail accounts and so they´ll be sure to change their address every couple of weeks. Needless to say, I would strongly advise readers of Click never to give their bank account details out to anyone they do not know in any circumstances let alone to a stranger over the Internet.
As to how they got your address is purely speculation but it is quite possible that they were just randomly creating e-mail addresses and e-mailing them on the off chance that it would work. Installing a spam filter such as Mailwasher to attempt to intercept any e-mail such as this before it reaches your inbox could prevent you receiving such messages in the future. The program has many unique features such as the ability to accept e-mails from recognised addresses only, it refuses e-mails from known `spammers´, it can read the e-mail and attempt to assess whether it is junk or not and you can also view and delete e-mails on the main server before you download them in order to save wasting time downloading junk. Any mail that is deemed to be junk mail can then be `bounced´ back to the sender to make it appear that your e-mail address was invalid which would hopefully mean they´d remove you from their lists.

Computer Articles 2007