Stephen Morton’s Blog

Why is everyone trying to FRAUD everyone today?

This morning, my wife and I were awoken by the sound of our telephone ringing at 9am on the dot. I answered it to be greeted with that tiresome “Congratulations, you have…” I hung up immediately. I am not sure if it’s simply because I get these kinda thing weekly now, or if it’s the inappropriate American accent that is always used on those kinda things (it’s unfortunate, that I now associate American accents with FRAUD here in Australia).

I then decided to get out of beg, and wandered over to my computer. What do I see but nearly 100 spam emails trying to extort money from me, trying to convince me that my penis is too small, that I need Viagra, my wife is sleeping around, I am sleeping around, I need to improve my search engine marketing… I mean it just goes on and on!!!

Now, 100 spam emails isn’t unusual for me for 1 day, usually I get more over the course of a single day.

The above doesn’t even talk about the attempted fraud I see daily on my web hosting business (fortunately I use several anti fraud systems), even the fraud and spam i get through my own various sites and blogs.

Now I know, I should expect to see more fraud/spam/rubbish than the average Joe, but I can say the average Joe also gets to see a significant amount of attempted fraud in their inbox and phone answering machine.

It seems to me that when I was growing up, I perhaps received a phone call once a year trying to Phish for details, when mum and dad would be home etc. Today, it seems that I get on average 100 attempts to phish/spam/fraud/decipher/steal from me every single day.

That’s an increase of 30000 x the fraud I see daily over 25 years!

It is no wonder that we are all so defensive, un trusting and down right cautious! And i know how to protect myself from this type of activity, what about the average Joe. My parents are a good casing point. I don’t think they receive Phishing emails today, but one day they will. Would they know it was fraud? Perhaps not.

Why aren’t the Police doing more? Surely, with Computer fraud, it can be tracked or something? I think the police aren’t interested, or incapable. This is becomming a very serious problem, not only for me, for everyone I know, yet, nothing seems to be happening in response.

Is it just me, or are others getting sick of this?????

I would love to hear your comments!

Steve