Gone Phishing - River of Scam Spam Continues to Flow

According to the Anti-Phishing Work Group - as many as 150,000,000 scam spam emails are sent daily. Fortunately most of these messages never make it into user's inboxes. They are instead caught by filtering systems installed on their server or desktop system.

The motivation for phishing is the same as any other spam. It costs virtually nothing to send - and all it takes is a single "buyer" (or sucker) to make the endeavor profitable. Large scale deployment of spam email blocking programs can help reduce this profitability.

There are dozens of different strategies. Some scammers directly try to fool people into giving them money. Other efforts are aimed at getting confidential user information. The info is then used to obtain control over the victims accounts, or otherwise take out credit in their name.

My favorite story is the one about the bank worker who tried to embezzle money from the bank to participate in the Nigerian money scam. She fortunately got caught.

In contrast to other spam, 'phishing' is largely illegal by definition. The spam message senders are already breaking the law. New laws are unlikely to prevent spam of this nature.

The SpamButcher spam filtering software can detect most phishing spam, and other unsolicited commercial email messages.

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