Meta: Too Many Nigerians

Last month I had to deal with a combined average of nine lottery or 419 scams per day. They aren't all that hard to handle, but they consume time and are really boring. It's the same old same old again and again. I gave up on reporting phish scams a long time ago (other people were reporting it anyhow), and then the stock spam got too prolific to document. Now I'm going to quit reporting each and every lottery or 419 scam I receive, giving me more time to concentrate on job scams -- and the rest of my life, which does actually exist, believe it or not. So, with apologies to those who found "The 419 Files" and "Lottery Scam Du Jour" useful, I will not be updating those blogs indefinitely.

Meta: Blog Upgrade

A quick apology to anyone who was using the Atom feed of this site and just received a bunch of old posts as though they were new. This is a result of my cutting over the blog to an upgraded version that Google are now offering. Hopefully there won't be any other undesirable side-effects.

Meta: Job Scam postings moved to new blog

Job scams have been the bread and butter of this blog for a while, but they've become sufficiently "mainstream" that I'm now relocating them to a dedicated blog, "Suckers Wanted". Like the other sub-blogs, this will aim for quantity of reportage over depth of analysis: I will forward as many job scams as I can to the blog, but not comment on them unless they genuinely warrant special attention.

Meta: This blog now syndicated using Atom

I've recently begun to appreciate the benefits of news aggregation using syndication formats like RSS and Atom. Blogspot blogs can publish Atom syndication data, so I've decided to go ahead and do it. This blog is primarily targeted at people searching for specific scams, but you may want to subscribe if you are following scams more broadly and want to hear about everything I encounter. If you want to subscribe, the appropriate site feed URL is http://ideceive.blogspot.com/atom.xml . If you're new to the whole idea of syndication and aggregation, try out Google Reader.

Meta: Current Interests no longer include Stock Spam

Stock spam quantities have reached unmanageably high levels this month. Consequently, I'm no longer interested in them. To give you some idea, in the last two weeks I've received stock spam covering the following stock symbols: ABZS, ADCS, AXCP, CDGT, CHMS, CYGT, GTEC, KLGE, PPTL, RMVN, SHCM, USTA, VNBL, and WWBP. If anyone wants me to forward all my stock spam to them for reporting purposes, I'd be happy to do so, but frankly this stuff is as common as muck at the moment.

Lottery scams and 419s are still being reported in their respective sub-blogs, and any job scams that come to my attention are reported here. Phishing scams I will report if they are interesting enough to warrant it, but eBay and PayPal phish attempts haven't been interesting in a long time now. I'm also not interested in fake watch spam, fake diploma spam, or any kind of pharmacy spam -- I'm sure everyone gets tons of it daily, as I do.

Anything new that comes along is almost sure to be interesting, and will be reported.

Meta: Stock Spam Gets Its Own Blog

My primary aim with 419s, lottery scams, and stock spam is just to make people aware it's happening -- that they aren't privileged recipients of fortuitous information, but rather just another recipient of scatter-shot scamming. To this end, my sub-blogs on 419s and lottery scams have been working well, saving me time while maximising search opportunities. I've now followed suit with Stock Spam, so I won't be reporting any more of that here.

Given that I'm pretty much tired of phishing scams, that leaves me to report Job Scams here, plus whatever else comes up that's new.

Meta: 419s Taken Elsewhere

The recent export of Lottery Scams has worked well for me, so I'm doing the same with 419s. From now on, please refer to The 419 Files for reports on the latest 419 sightings.

Meta: Lottery Scams Taken Elsewhere

I get a lot of lottery scam spam and 419s, but I've been neglecting them lately due to the fact that they are so common, but require a fair bit of fiddling to document. I do want to make archived copies available to those who search for them, however, so I've come up with a more efficient approach. I've started a secondary blog called Lottery Scam Du Jour, and all my lottery scam spam just gets dumped there without further comment. If I really want to comment about a particular spam, I'll add a comment to the post, but in general I'll just provide the text without further comment. The only thing missing will be the source IP address: blog entry dates will reflect the time of arrival.

If this process works for me, I may do the same for 419s and Stock Spam.

Meta: Pump and Dump becomes Stock Spam

I've been prefixing all my stock spam reports with "Pump and Dump", but it's become clear that not all instances of stock spam are pump and dump operations. The perennial CWTD spam is a prime example of this. So from now on, I'll use the more terse and generally applicable prefix "Stock Spam". Mind you, I'm losing interest in the whole stock spam thing, and will tend to let it accumulate a bit before reporting it, so don't count on me for real-time stock spam reports.

Meta: Public Domain

This blog is published anonymously because spammers can be vindictive bastards, and I'd rather not make it easy for them to target me. The kinds of people who write and disseminate viruses, or attempt to steal people's money by lying to them, tend not to shrink from mounting the odd denial-of-service attack or Joe Job against those who would shine a light on their schemes. I've borne the brunt of these retaliatory attacks in the past, and I've no desire to go looking for the experience again. Thus, the relative anonymity of this blog, where I am known by the nondescript handle of "Spotter".

Such anonymous publication creates an interesting problem with regards to copyright. When I decide to retire from the deception spotting and reporting game, the copyright on the posts would still belong to me, but nobody would know how to contact me in order to gain permission to reprint something. The work would effectively be trapped in copyright limbo. My goals in creating this blog are purely altruistic -- or possibly purely hostile because I despise cheating and lying. Whatever the case, I've no intention whatsoever to pursue monetary gain through the publication of this resource. Nor can I expect to gain any personal fame through it without compromising my anonymity. Consequently, I think the whole notion of "copyright" is useless to me in the construction of this blog, and I renounce it.

I hereby waive copyright in all original work I have created in this blog to date. I also waive copyright in future work in this blog, up until such time, if any, as I announce a new copyright policy.

Meta: On Hold

I'm currently very busy performing an upgrade of my personal computing infrastructure and a couple of other projects, and this has rendered posting to the blog very inconvenient. Consequently, I'm not going to bother posting every little 419, stock scam and phish that comes my way for the time being. I'll continue to report on anything outrageously deceptive, but the common or garden variety of deception is on hold for now. Hopefully I'll soon have this all sorted out, and resume the regular pattern of reporting.

Meta: Category Change

The category "Payment Processing Job Scam" is going to be abbreviated to just plain "Job Scam". The jobs invariably do involve payment processing, but it just seems unnecessarily verbose to spell it out all the time. Past entries will not be revised because it would break link names (and I'm too lazy anyhow).

Meta: New Category

Up until now, I've been lumping Lottery Scams together with 419 Advance Fee Fraud. Although the two are closely related, there is enough of both and enough difference between them to warrant separate classification. I'm not going to retro-actively re-label all the lottery fraud in the archive so far, because doing so will also change the URLs for the articles and break any links people have made. For the record, advance fee fraud is a normal part of a lottery scam, but there's usually more to it than that -- thus the distinction.

Meta: Current Interests

Recently I've received an incessant stream of PayPal phish. This has become tedious to the point that I don't even care to mention it anymore. I'm somewhat inclined to feel that way about phishing in general, but PayPal phish is definitely off the menu until further notice due to sheer excess of quantity.

I also delete without comment any spam that's hawking medication, software, or loans. With particular regards to software, yes, it's deceptive, but it's the same old lie every time. They offer to sell cheap software, when in actual practice they are selling unlicensed ("pirated") software. If you really want to obtain unlicensed software (and run the various risks associated with it, legal and otherwise), then there are much cheaper ways to do it. My personal recommendation is that you either suck it up and pay full price from a reputable source, or break the habit and start looking into solving your computing needs with genuinely free software. No further comment.

I'm still interested in reporting the latest 419 lies, stock manipulation scams, and deceptive job offers, along with those things that are actually new or unusual and therefore interesting. And I will continue to report any Internet practice that strikes a loud, dissonant cluster of pipe-organ notes in my ethics-sensitive regions.