Current Events Watch

If you have an email account, you probably get some of the same messages I get. The U.S. Department of Justice is warning people about fraudulent SPAM messages claiming to be from DOJ. The message begins, “Dear Citizen.� The message reportedly asserts the recipient is the subject of complaints filed with DOJ, and a case number may even be included. Naturally, the sender thought to include an attachment containing a copy of the complaint and contact info for the recipient.

And naturally, your computer may have a meltdown if you open the attachment.

I am amazed sometimes at the prospect of people opening such emails, or any of those that immediately go into the trash file at the several email accounts I have. Here’s a sample of subject lines from this morning:

[Re] 2: Hello Dear!
First Know Thou I Begot Him on the Empress
Sexually Explicit!
Notification of Limited Account Access

(Note: There are at least a dozen more related to the size of a man’s sexual organ; two related to bank accounts I don’t own with banks in another country, and as always, two with messages about my PayPal account which I do not have.)

Over the last week I’ve also received a few emails from someone who tells me her family’s fortune is held hostage in a cargo container. All I have to do is send her complete information on my identity and we can take it from there. I’ll get part of the fortune. The only thing this letter omits that others like it usually offer is a tragedy. I’ve got hundreds of emails claiming a family perished in part or in whole when a plane crashed. There are countless planes allegedly crashing in the vicinity of Africa. Such crashes run a close second to love scams. These scams occur once an email relationship has sprung up from an online network or community listing. Rapport is established. Then your beloved confesses he can’t cash his money orders or she can’t get enough money to leave her employer who is literally holding her hostage. In Africa, of course. Sometimes people are bilked of thousands of dollars, all in the name of love.

The email about the DOJ message came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Consumers may file a complaint about the DOJ email or a similar hoax at www.IC3.gov.

Meanwhile, I’m sure somewhere in the world a creative SPAM proponent is cooking up yet another way to either infect my PC, steal my identity or transfer bucks from my pocket to his or hers.

With apologies to Benjamin Franklin, I declare SPAM a certainty like death and taxes. You can count on it, and sometimes, maybe even be entertained.

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