[DM-MUG] Scam

[Sharalyn]

Thanks for the response. I hope you¹re right. But it still seems odd that
the person would send me a photo of their birds but not answer after that.

Most but not all of the spam I get goes to the simpler email address I use
for shopping.

 Besides the usual invasion of greedy taxation, dishonest politicians,
credit card companies and other legal scam artists, my house was broken into
last week, and spam likewise feels very personally invasive so overall, I¹m
just not feeling very safe these days.


On 8/28/08 4:32 PM, "Bill Davis" <bill.davis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Unless you filled your email address into a web page form, I doubt it was a
> scam to capture your email address.  Spammers have automated tools to surf the
> web and harvest email addresses from web sites etc, plus get them from the
> Outlook address book on Windows machines.   It's possible, but rather doubtful
> that they'd use a scam like that to get a handful of addresses that an add for
> free parrots would draw.  Too unusual a topic.   Now if it was "free iPod",
> that's another story...
>  
> As to the picture downloading something bad to your computer, that's very
> doubtful.  You aren't running Windows.   Such things don't really exist except
> as "proof of concept" for the Mac if they exist at all.
>  
> There are some free virus checkers you can get for the Mac, but they really
> just check for PC viruses so you don't spread them.   Search
> VersionTracker.com for them.
>  
> Email spammers are now also just "guessing" at email addresess.  Yours is
> rather unusual so that's doubtful in this case, but I get tons of spam because
> I generally use my real name, and it's an easy to guess one.  Gmail's spam
> filter kills several thousand spam messages a week for me because of that.
>  
> Most likely a spam scanner 'bot found your email address on some web page
> somewhere or got it from some other source. Or someone vendor sold your email
> address.  The latter is more likely.
>  
>  - Bill
>  
> On 8/28/08, Sharalyn <homeonthefarm at iowatelecom.net> wrote:
>> I answered an ad on craislist for someone needing a home for free parrots
>> today, and I'm pretty sure that its trick to get my email address because
>> ever since I answered, I've been getting a spate of junk mail and they
>> haven't answered to my response.  What's really scary is that there was an
>> attached photo that I've opened. Do you suppose there is something bad about
>> it that it has downloaded into my computer, and do you know any way I can
>> find it?
>> 
>> 
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