Scam emails, big up-tick recently. Anyone care to comment on the why of this?

There have been trends noticed in 2000 and 2004 that spam has increased dramatically around the time of the US Presidential elections. It makes "getting in the door" so to speak easier as people are more inclined to open these types of emails around election time. It's also easier for the foreign based scammers to seem knowledgeable (example: The world knows about the US Presidential race, but a email scammer in Nigeria or Thailand doesn't know who's running for a Senate seat in Florida). If you ask anybody who works in an IS&T capacity, they will agree with this trend regarding their company's spam emails usually boom around the election.

Somehow they got your email addy. Did you register your email address on any websites lately, or post it anywhere ?

They also use mass emailer programmes which send thousands if not millions of emails out to random addresses generated by the program. They will still get a few hits. If you receive one, and you then open that message in your inbox, they immediately know you do exist, so they spam you more.

I got a big upsurge of them when an American website decided to post my address on their main page. I no longer use that address however, thankfully.

Whatever you do, don't reply. You may even wish to forward it to a law enforcement agency, such as the US secret service. They did supply an address for people to forward scam emails too. A bit of googling should find it.

You probably understand the motives of the Nigerian scam then, and you know how things will continue to go wrong and you will begin loosing money, getting that 3.4million us dollars.

Cheating people out of money almost seems commonplace to me. The way I look at things, if someone is dumb enough to buy into a scam like that, you deserve their money. To find people that are that dumb, you need to send emails to thousands and thousands of accounts. It only takes one moron to send a few grand to make it all worth it.

spam

cheers