I have never gotten any kind of response or acknowledgement from forwarding these kinds of things. OTH, if our mailboxes are full of this C*@P, just imagine how many THEY get!!!

I guess it can't hurt to send them, but for now it'll have to be someone else's duty. Rotsa Ruck.

My Spam is growing daily, thanks for the tips

Unfortunately, no matter where we go...we'll have to deal with such people :(

Scott

Beth-I dont think they would send you any response but that sure would be nice to know when they caught these people (did you see Dateline NBC to Catch a Con Man?)  I would think these agencies have some mainframe computer that sorts everything by some criteria and they can track where it is coming from.  I think my tax dollars are paying for stuff like that.

Michael-I was thinking about playing a game with them and sending them to places looking for me but I just dont have time for it.  Maybe if they have one of their "diplomats" here in Hawaii, I could get the sucker to go downtown to Waikiki and wait for me by the statue of "Duke Kahanamoku".  There is a 24 hour video camera that is on the statue and I can sit at home with and watch the moron waiting for me.  Maybe I will do it someday.

Scott-I was frustrated at my inbox this morning which is what prompted me to write the post.  I figured it would be worth a try to nail some of these clowns.

I had a person actually call me regarding one of these scams.  He wanted to do business and he was calling from Africa.  It was very odd.

Dateline actually did a " to catch a ..." episode on these types of scams. It was pretty interesting and funny at the same time. I'm just curious, who is actually falling for these scams. I mean come on, someone must be falling for these scams if they have been sending these types of messages for years.

I was wondering why I have been receiving so much junk mail, bank scams included.  I used to get them all the time years ago.  I had finally gotten my email cleaned up and never got much junk mail.  Since joining Active Rain, the junk mail has started again.

Beth-Wow!  They have resorted to telephone calls too?  I thought maybe they would only do that if they "hooked you via email". 

Robert-Yes.  I watched that Dateline special also.  I want to know the same thing....are there really people out there that fall for this stuff?  I sure would hope not.

Due to spam, we've purposely never exposed members email addresses on ActiveRain, instead using the contact forms.  There are members that occassionally put their email address directly on their profile or blog.  Spammers have bots that spider pages just like Google spiders a web page looking for these addresses to add to their spam database.

There still are some spammers that are driven enough to manually send spam emails via contact forms, but we're usually able to catch them and shut them off pretty quickly.

Roger-I dont mean to insinuate that it is Active Rains fault but the more I post to web makes me and anyone else more vulnerable to this sort of solicitation.  If I had a choice of dumping AR and changing my email address or just dealing with the Nigerian Bank Scams I would just deal with it.  AR is just too valuable of a tool to get rid of.

Matt-Thanks for clearing that up.  I probably bring it upon myself by putting my email addresses all over the place so I shouldn't complain huh?  Like I had said to Roger Stensland (see above), I would just deal with it rather than ditching AR.  Aloha!

Randy's been getting phone calls at 4am!  I just don't open and immediately send to blocked sender list. 

I played along with one of them who was messaging through Active Rain. I posted it in a blog post that when on forever.  Every time I think they gave up they start again.

Sally-I hope Randy hasnt figured out that it is me calling him!  LOL!!!  I swear that I put them on the blocked senders list but then I get twice as many from others!  It is driving me nuts.

Randy-I think Sally is doing it :)

David... how funny. Not that you get these, but that I just wrote a blog about this earlier today. Best SPAM yet..... beware.......   But I didn't talk about a solution....  just showed the e-mail that I received, because it was different than the previous ones sent. I am going to link your post to mine, if you don't mind, because of the solutions that you gave.

Jeff-I just visited your post and yup, thats the same email I got.  I linked to your post (see above).  Aloha to you mortgage man.