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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0229 Spammer Tricks:

Spammers and scammers know how to work the mind games that make even the most sophisticated and skeptical computer users fall for their tricks. In an analysis of common email scams, a psychology professor at the University of California (Santa Barbara) said that for all the software and "mental" filtering users apply, spam works, and always will. He contends that some proportions of users are gullible, naive, and irrational. Even if just one-half of 1% of all email users are gullible and can be separated from $20, he claims that's a potential economy of $5.5 BILLION in the US alone. He warns that even cynics can be fooled into opening questionable email by providing recipients with a sense of familiarity and legitimacy, either by creating the illusion that the email is from a friend or colleague, or providing plausible warnings from a respected institution. Once the victim opens the email, criminals use two basic motivational processes, approach and avoidance, or a combination of the two, to persuade victims to click on dangerous links, provide personal information, or download risky files. Generally, people are motivated to approach positive goals -- winning the lottery, say -- or to avoid unpleasant realities, such as losing a credit card. Scam-spammers play on both. Although he offered little practical advice for deflecting scam-spam -- he suggested that "almost anyone" is gullible at times -- he paraphrased an old adage: "In order to overcome their approach and avoidance tendencies, consumers must realize that if a message is either too good or too bad to be true, it probably is."

(ComputerWorld 26JUN07)

Last Modified: Sunday, 22-Jul-2007 08:44:32 EDT