I don’t know about you, but I’m sick to death of all the emails I get from scammers trying to rip me off. Sometimes there are as many as five or six a day, often from the same persistent source. Their propositions or threats differ, but they all seem to want my personal details, passwords and bank account numbers. Even listing them as blocked senders and blocked domains doesn’t seem to work when the same scammers pop up time after time.

I used to just delete them without even reading the contents, but now report them to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Find out how you can do this by visiting their website at www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310294

Another website to visit is SCAMwatch at https://www.scamwatch.gov.au

How have these scammers gotten hold of my email address? Most likely through all these so-called “funny” emails that do the rounds. Most people seem to send them by open listing several recipients in the To box and with quite a large history list of the many people they have passed through. A scammer could reap dozens of email addresses from a single “funny” email this way.

I probably delete about 95% of these so called “funny” emails and of the few I do pass on, the forwarding history is always deleted and the recipients are listed in the Bcc (blind carbon copy) box. That way I don’t pass on other peoples’ email addresses to anybody else.

Now, if only everyone else who forwards these “funny” emails would do the same ...

Copy this image and add it to all "funny" emails that you forward.

Tuesday 7 June 2011:    Now that I report these scammers to ACMA I get far less of their emails than before. It's gone from five or six per day down to about one a week, so I guess it must be having some effect.