Online Cell Phone Scams and Spam

They’re out there. Individuals trying to make a quick buck at
your expense. You labour hours on end to produce quality content
on your website only to get repetitive requests for huge numbers
of product or promises for the greatest deals online. As a
webmaster for a cell phone and PDA site, I’ve had my share of
spam and scams come through, mostly via email, some posted on my
forum. The purpose of this article is to provide a few methods
of detecting spam and scams, and provide a few examples as well.
Take a look over and protect yourself from online cellular fraud.

Anybody catch the 60 minutes episode where Andy Rooney teaches
faithful viewers how to detect junk mail? Junk email works in
much the same way. Items with subject headings ‘Great deal’, or
‘limited time offer’ usually can wait, and definitely don’t have
great offers hidden inside. Webmasters and consumers should have
a golden rule, if you don’t know where an offer came from (you
don’t know the sender) then delete it. Plain and simple. Most
free email accounts, GMAIL, Hotmail, Yahoo!, have good filters
that label incoming spam and scams as, well, spam. However, the
majority of webmasters do not use free email accounts for the
sake of professionalism. To these individuals, a basic virus
detector usually includes email protection and generally will
detect possible spam items before they hit your box. Having said
this, if you’re doing link campaigns, or joining forums, etc.,
in order to promote your site, it may not be a bad idea to
enlist the free online email account and prevent all the
unwanted junk from hitting your work emails.

It’s been my experience that some people out there hand pick
contact pages of potential victims, and therefore the email may
be somewhat individualised to your site. Your name, the site
name, or similar content, may be communicated within the email
making it appear somewhat legitimate. Be mindful of your email
accounts (contact pages) that are exposed to the world wide web.
Some smart scammers have created bots that will automatically
harvest emails that are sitting live on the web and input them
into a spam list. Remember this when trying to determine whether
something from the web is legit.

If an questionable email has contact information, Google it. If
it’s a legitimate company contacting you, they should have some
type of online presence. I’ve noticed that the majority of spam
and scams have fake mail addresses, but no online address.
Furthermore, emails usually come from online web accounts like
Yahoo!. Not only can you search contact information, you can
serach content as well. Chances are a webmaster has posted the
contents on a forum somewhere wondering about its legitimacy. I
can’t stress this enough, take 4 seconds and doabout the email
before you consider replying.

With these simple and quick tips you should be able to identify
the majority of scam and spam emails. If in doubt, delete. If
something was important that you deleted, or legitimate, the
individual will likely try to contact you again. With this in
mind, here are some examples of spam and scam emails from the
cellular and technology industry, my comments are in brackets.

Subject: WE HAVE LOTS OF GSM/NEXTEL MOBILE PHONES AT VERY CHEAP
PRICES”””” [The subject always varies.]

PHONES SELLERS INCORPORATED 12 Ademola drive,ikoyi Lagos
Nigeria [Many, many, many emails have come with Nigeria as
the purported origin, doesn't mean it's from there, but out of
country addresses are always suspect of being fraudulent.]

Dear Sir/Ma,

LETTER OF BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP We are mobile phones
wholesalers.We deals on all brands and models of mobile phones
such as Nokia,Motorola,Samsung and many more at very cheap
prices. We are using this medium to look for buyers of mobile
phones.Do kindly reply back if you are interested and as you do
you will be glad you do,thank’s and God bless.

Fola David President.

[A variation of the above is instead of written body
content, they will actually send a product list of the cell
phones they require asking for a dozen of each. Sounds like
great business!...Here's the next one]

CONSOLIDATED PHONES LIMITED 152, OZORUMBA MBADIWE STREET OFF
KINGSWAY ROAD. VICTORY ISLAND LAGOS, [no record of this
address] TEL: 0803-3870-694 FAX: 1- 817-0845, [not even a
real number] Email:consphones_ltd@seeqmail.com. [bad
domain] or consphone@galmail.co.za

Dear sir,

COMMERCIAL SALE OF BULK MOBILE PHONES

WE ARE EXPORTERS AND IMPORTERS OF GSM, TDMA, AND CDMA PHONES.
[CDMA Phones do not run the majority of African
networks.] WE ARE ONE OF THE LEADING COMPANIES IN NIGERIAN
COMMUNICATIONS SECTOR, AND WE GIVE OUT OUR BEST IN SATISFYING
OUR NUMEROUS CUSTORMERS. WE SELL IN BULK AND AT A VERY CHEAP
RATE.

WE WILL LIKE TO USE THIS MEDIUM TO INTRODUCE TO YOU OUR VARIOUS
PHONE BRANDS AND ACCESSORIES LISTED IN OUR PRICE LIST. THESE
ITEMS ARE READY FOR SALE AND THE PRICE LIST IS AS GIVEN BELOW.
WE WILL BE WAITING AND READY TO ASSIST YOU IN ANY INFORMATION
REQUIRED BY YOU, AND ALSO, WE ARE READY TO DO BUSINESS WITH ANY
COMPANY, INDIVIDUALS OR GROUP AS LONG AS THEY ARE NOT
FRAUDULENT. [Of course you wouldn't.]

WE WILL SEND OUR RANGE OF PRODUCTS AND PRICE LIST ON DEMAND.

BEST REGARD.

JULIAN JONES (MISS) Email: jonesjulian2001@yahoo.com [This
email is different than the ones atop] For: CONSOLIDATED
PHONES LTD.

But two examples of two spam/scam emails. Keep your eyes
peeled webmasters!</b