Today, I was reading about blogging on my home page. Little did I know, until this afternoon, I had not truly understood this web phenomenon. After reading the article, I decided that I, as a writer, may genuinely enjoy this activity and as a writer, others may too.
The plan for this blog that I am constructing is to open a fair and friendly forum for topics of our culture, no matter how frivolous, that plague our minds, disrupt our days, bond us together, and generally make us a society. These can be negative or positive because as everyone knows we enjoy, whether we admit it or not, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We appreciate sharing tears of joy as much as we revel in tears of sorrow.
I will say right off that I am a mother, but will promise not to dwell simply on parenting; there are plenty of those sites already. Generating a venting session is also not part of my vision for this blog. I am not necessarily world traveled and ingenious, but I feel I can bring an interesting perspective from the general public (or…maybe, I just have too much time on my hands).
Fair warning I also love playing devil’s advocate, because I believe that more than one perspective should be revealed, therefore my blogs may not always be my own view. Remember I said my goal was to create a ‘fair’ platform of ideas.
Now on to my first topic: Phishing scams. We have had email for the better portion of 25 years now and the internet for even longer. In this wonderful age of technology information travels incomprehensibly fast. Almost upon birth of our ability to contact virtually the entire world via cyberspace the revelation for a new type of con was also born. The level of anonymity that could be achieved had been unmatched previously and when the ability to transfer funds electronically arrived, well, crooks celebrated.
Alternately, word of such conduct spread almost as quick and security procedures and tools spawned from the rampant crime scene. Not only were people alerted and educated against such villainous schemes, ever-evolving technology was designed to block or track offenders and laws then developed which prosecuted acts of stealing (i.e. identity theft) via the web.
This was all several years ago, I understand, but do these dishonest people really think that we have forgotten their shenanigans? My spam box still receives at least 10 emails a day from people claiming they are employed by a foreign bank that has some incredible amount of money for me, for whatever crazy reason, and that all I have to do is send them a few bits of personal information to receive my fortune.
I must admit they have gotten wiser. My emails now come from Dr. Robert Water, Andrew Tweedie, UPS, or even the FBI, but the content is still the same scam. Usually not only are they obviously unrealistic, they have grammatical and spelling errors galore.
Though the scams may have been exposed a decade ago, our defenses against such attacks are still in place and our awareness has not subsided. In fact, there are now paid advertisements on television about identity theft and everything financial from insurance to credit cards come with privacy statements.
We know our rights and I find it hard to believe that this is a lucrative scheme these days. I suspect that anyone desperate enough to fall for this has to be desperately low on funds already, thus not allowing much thievery to take place.
In closing, my question is not why do these criminals still even bother, because obviously they must still score at least intermittently, but why, with all of the afore mentioned advancements, are they still able to try? Also, why would we, knowing that the internet has the potential to render us vulnerable, enter such a realm without arming ourselves with at least information?
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