The top email offers to tell you how to save
money on the prescription drugs you buy for your arthritis even though you
are only in your 30s and do not have arthritis.
Spam!Dozens or, maybe, even,
hundreds of emails offering you financial deals that have to be good to be
legitimate or medical treatments that an African witchdoctor would not
believe.
You would love to reach into your monitor through the Internet to strangle
the people who sent you this crap.
Now, you can.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wants copies of the spam you get.
The FTC receives about 300,000 samples of deceptive spam – forwarded by
computer users – each day, and stores it in a database. The FTC and its
law enforcement partners use the database to generate cases against people
who use spam to spread false or misleading information about their
products or services. To better handle the high volume of spam forwarded
to the database, the FTC recently opened a new email box –
spam@uce.gov.
The FTC’s spam database has served as the basis for FTC cases involving
pyramid schemes, money-making chain letters, credit card scams, credit
repair scams, bogus weight-loss plans, fraudulent business opportunities,
and other scams that were promoted via email.
So, choose the most outrageous spam offers you get and send them along to
the FTC.
“Get rich by loading up your credit cards!” offers one spam email. Just
forward that sucker to the FTC.
Oh! You have been a sucker for a spam offer?
If you think you have been taken advantage of by a spam scam, you can file
a complaint with the FTC online at
www.ftc.gov. Complaints will help the FTC find and stop people who are
using spam to defraud consumers.
And, to learn more about how to avoid spam scams and reduce the clutter in
your in-box, check out www.ftc.gov/spam.
Your best revenge against the companies who fill your email box with
fraudulent and worthless offers is not to become one of their victims by
buying into such offers. |
