Quote:
Xrati said:
When I get those e-mails, I just wish I could write a virus and send it back to them trashing their computers. But alas, I'm not that sharp! 
From what I do understand, most of those e-mails come from prisons where the inmates are sending these things out and running scams from prison! Wouldn't be great if prisons were for prisoners and not Gates wannabe's! 
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Sometimes prisoners are found to be running scams from within prisons. Most of these scams, whether '419' appeals for a 'business relationship' or phishing for account info or plain old advertising spam come from overseas. Many of the spammers have been traced back to the US, it is true, but most of the other stuff does come from gangs over seas. The Nigerians are still a major source if not the largest single source of the '419' scams. Russian organized crime is a very big force in phishing.
The best revenge you can get on all of them is to
REPORT THEM.
Use the 'view source' command on your mail reader and find where they actually came from. Then send the source
with the full headers to
abuse@domain.name and/or
postmaster@domain.name and you'll stand a very good chance of getting it stopped even if the scammers are out of reach of the authorities in the country where the ISP is located. Some ISPs have special methods for reporting abuse. Yahoo! for example has a web page that I use constantly. I guess lots of s(c|p)ammers like the convenience of a Yahoo! email account. When I get a scam/spam with a return address in a Yahoo! domain I go to:
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/abuse/cgi_abuse and fill out the form.
Phishing is slightly more difficult. You have to go to the site for the bank or whatever business is being spoofed and get their report address. I've got the eBay, and Paypal fraud addresses permanently in my address book as well as the addresses for my bank and credit card company.
It's annoying to have to report several scam/spam messages a day but I do it. If I didn't I'd probably be getting 20-30 a day instead of 2-3.