Scams Keep Coming

Scams Keep Coming: a reader asks… Is there any way to stop the scam emails? I get all kinds, and they look very real, but aren’t. I used your advice and looked at the email address in the From line (the actual email address), and it’s always some random email address, Gmail, Instagram, etc. What can I do to stop this?

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to stop all junk, spam, or scam emails from reaching your inbox. There are ways to fight it, but you’re playing whack-a-mole. Upwards of 80% of the millions of emails zipping around the internet at any instant are spam, scam, or otherwise unwanted emails. Unfortunately, the email protocols we use are primarily designed to deliver email from a sender to a recipient. What makes this so much worse than junk postal mail is that there’s no significant cost to the sender. Scammers buy lists for a few dollars on the dark web and send out millions of emails daily. There are enough people who fall for these scams that the scammers are motivated to keep scamming.

If you use Gmail, Google uses crowd-sourcing to help block unwanted emails. In the Gmail interface (online at https://gmail.com), you can choose one or more unwanted emails and mark them as spam in just a few clicks. When Google determines that enough people have marked an email as spam, they add it to their block list for everyone. Unfortunately, scammers are constantly setting up new email accounts, so it’s a constant battle. Other email service providers may or may not do something similar, but in general, a ‘free’ email account that many people use (Verizon, AOL, Yahoo, etc.) has almost nothing to help you eliminate spam from your inbox.

We all have to spend an amount of time each day deleting junk email from our inboxes, that’s the price we pay for cheap or free email service. Even paid email services can’t stop all spam. The best advice I can give at this point is for you to take a few extra seconds and report all spam that appears in your inbox to your email service provider. If you use an app like Outlook or webmail like outlook.com or Gmail, there are buttons in the interface to report spam.

Once your email address gets on a spammer’s list, it’s impossible to get it off. Spammers resell their lists to other spammers as well. You can change your email address, which can be annoying to do, but will stop the spam, at least in the short term. And while some pundits advise to unsubscribe from junk emails, responding to junk emails often simply makes your email address more valuable to the spammers.

Sorry if this sounds like no help to you at all, but we are all fighting what often seems like a losing battle against the junk email purveyors. Short of not using email, we all need to work together to identify spam to our service providers so they can block it. All is not lost; email service providers are also looking at various ways to reduce spam, including the aforementioned crowd-sourcing by users, as well as ways to identify spam using various algorithms. But we’re a long way away from a real solution.

And it’s not just emails, scammers are using every possible way, phone calls, door knockers, text messages, poisoned websites, you-name-it. For example, I received this text message, purportedly from the Virginia DMV, but the link they included doesn’t point to a legitimate DMV website, but to some scammer’s domain (dmv.virginia-govkua.live, which is not legit). Of course, you shouldn’t click or follow links in text messages unless you know and trust the sender.

Some scams are easy to spot, but others are quite sophisticated and require more effort to determine whether they’re legit. Your best bet is to be more than a little bit paranoid about unsolicited communications, especially any that try to get you to click a link or call a number. Don’t click or call or respond in any way. And don’t bother to try to unsubscribe to emails either, that simply proves that your email is valid (and worth more money to scammers).