Because I get so many e-mail messages about problems with my eBay account, I may never have an eBay account. That’s right; I do not have an eBay account. But I get five or six messages a week from people with questions or problems or downright insults about my eBay account.
This is what’s known as “phishing.” As in “phraud.” Or “phony.”
The Internet is awash in fishy, or phishy, exhortations, imprecations and solicitations. And those of us who make their e-mail addresses public — as is mine, at the end of this column — invite this unwanted phalanx of phurtive phisherpholk, otherwise identified as identity thieves.
In one week, a typical week, my two AOL e-mail inboxes were bepooped with 75 e-mail messages that came from people or places I had never heard of. (Bepooped, by the way, is not recognized as a word by Microsoft Word. But neither is phishing, or even blog, for that matter. All of them get the squiggly red underline of disapproval.)
This uninvited poop comes from faraway places, from people who create and destroy Web addresses wantonly and rapidly, ever moving, ever seeking new suckers who will provide them with sensitive personal information. The phispherpholk may then use this information to steal the poor phools’ identities, bank accounts, credit card accounts and good name.
Update your information, they say. Or a bidder has a question about your item. Or correct this anomaly or your account will be terminated. Our last notice to you!
There are pleas from orphans, widows and lost relatives in distant lands. Send money, they plead, and untold riches will be freed up for us to share.
Someone somewhere is under the impression I’m in the mortgage lending business. I regularly get three or four e-mails a week about marvelous opportunities available to us mortgage lenders, even as we face unprecedented problems with foreclosures (or, perhaps, phoreclosures).
The public e-mail address, this one, gets 10 times as many spam messages as my other one, which is used mostly for correspondence in the woefully underdeveloped and underappreciated field of journalism ethics.
At the ethical website, all of the spam invited me to buy cheap Cialis, or varieties thereof, including hCIALISb, CIAetLIS, CIApkLIS and CIAdbLIS. Or I could also get, at remarkably shrunken prices, qVIAGRAa, VIAcoGRA or VIAhmGRA.
But no pornography. It’s disturbing that whoever is behind these phishing expeditions somehow has determined that I have passed beyond the virile porn market to the “poor old foop; you need medicine” demographic.
Then there are the postcards, greetings and invitations. Something less than half of these may be legitimate. The others should make any rational person suspicious. Such as the message, which didn’t get caught by the spam filter, beginning: “You just have received a virtual postcard from my name!” I didn’t click on that link. I was waiting for a virtual postcard from Your Name Here.
The week’s crop also included at least a half-dozen notifications that I had won a lottery somewhere — in the United Kingdom, for one, as well as the Netherlands and someplace identifying itself as “Info-Euromillions.” As with the other friends in foreign lands, it typically required sending some money somewhere before the Millions in Winnings (U.S. Dollars) could be forwarded to me.
“We Apologies,” said one message addressed to “Dear Winner,” “for the delay of your payment and all the inconveniences and inflict that we might have indulge you through.”
The message was signed by “Henry Lincoln.” Perhaps a distant — very distant — relative of Honest Abe.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News. His column appears twice a month.
