In computer news this week, 05/08/2002

Breaking the chain of chain letters on the internet ....

Everyone likes to get email - that familiar voice you hear when you log onto the internet and depending on which ISP service you use you hear "You've got mail" or Mailcheck"! And sometimes you see an email from a friend, or a friend of a friend, which you notice has at least a dozen other email address attached to it, and you just know it's still another internet chain letter.

Many of these chain letters are well meaning in nature - in the past 2 months I've received the same one from 3 different friends informing me that Nina Totenberg announced last week that NPR and PBS are threatened with closure and that we are all supposed to sign the attached petition and forward it to dozens of our friends.

This is a noble cause, but it's simply not true. NPR and PBS are not threatened with closure, there is no formal petition to sign, and this chain letter has been circulating on the internet since 1995.

Another form of chain letter is malicious in nature, and sometimes comes as a snail mail letter. I've received both, from a supposed manager of a bank in some African country, usually Nigeria, and the gist of this letter is to get access to your personal bank account number, under the guise of them needing to deposit millions of dollars in a US bank account, and someone has told them that you are a trustworthy person who would help them.

There are other charity chain letters that are truly malicious in nature - such as the current ones with any kind of a message about the world trade center disaster which may contain a bogus solicitation to have you send money to some post office box, or may even contain a virus that can do considerable damage to your computer if you open it, and your friend has probably already been hit by this email virus - it has taken over his computer - and emailed itself to everyone in his address book - including you.

You can find good information about all the current internet bogus chain letters at breakthechain.org. Here you will find a search window that you can type key words into - such as npr - and then you will see a list of the chain letters related to your search subject , which explains the bogus content of all of them. You can also email your friend from who you received the chain letter at breakthechain.org - so that they can see the real truth about their email. You will also find the top 10 things to look for when you suspect you have received a bogus internet chain letter, which include the letter begging you to forward it to everyone you know.

A related topic to all this is actual internet scams, emails you receive from people that are flat out trying to rip you off selling things through the internet like herbal viagra , how to become an internet investigator, make an overnight killing in the stock market, repair your credit rating, bogus internet auctions, dialing an 809 number for information which can cost you hundreds of dollars, and dozens more. At scambusters.org you can get a lot of good information on what the current scams are - the top 2 relate to identity theft and the WTC disaster, how to avoid them, and how to report them.

There is a very dark side to the internet, and unless you protect yourself and your family by keeping yourself informed of the dangers, you can easily have a very unpleasant online experience.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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