Smishing is very similar, the method of delivery however is through your cell phone.  Spammers have started sending fraudulent cell phone text messages, trying to trick people into revealing personal information, financial account numbers, and passwords.  The spammer usually tries to threaten the receipient with account cancelation or charges on their account if they do not comply.

Do not be fooled.  Just like with email, if it doesn’t smell right, it probably is a scam.  You should not respond to the sender. Do not call any telephone numbers provided in the text message – also don’t click on any links.

They are called phisher sites, and they look legitimate. So does the e-mail, which claims to come from a company you do business with and tells you to click on a link to go to the site and update your personal information.

It’s all a scam, aimed at draining your bank account or stealing your identity.

The Federal Trade Commission said it has just brought a case against the 17-year-old creator of one of the sites, which claimed to be for the AOL Billing Center. Officials said he has agreed to give up ,500 in ill-gotten gains and is now barred from sending e-mail spam for life.

Dear Client,

We’d like to provide you with an update on recent spam attacks.

Our message security vendor has advised us on high volumes of bogus CNN and MSNBC messages that contain links to download malware. Spammers have copied the contents of CNN and MSNBC alerts and substituted a link that prompts users to upgrade to a new version of a fake Adobe Flash player.

The security service has detected and blocked the vast majority of these attacks, and continues to release protections to stop the new mutations. Their capture rate is over 99%; however, the attack volumes are so large (in the hundreds of millions of messages) that a 1% passthrough rate means that a few messages may end up in your inbox.

For best security practices, if you see any CNN, MSNBC, or suspicious news alert messages:

• Do not deliver these messages from your Message Center or Quarantine Summary.
• Delete these messages from your inbox.
• Do not click on any links in the messages.

If you need to access CNN or MSNBC content, visit the website directly.

Please be assured that our security service considers virus and spam protection as their highest priority, and continues to be on the cutting edge against new spam attacks and tactics.

But several Internet providers are making this pitch in all seriousness. They might even succeed, but not without forcing major changes in how e-mail works.

This “challenge-response” spam protection departs from previous spam blocking. Instead of assuming that most e-mail is benign, then trying to screen the junk, challenge-response assumes mail from strangers is probably spam. Unknown senders then have to prove that they’re not automated spam relays by passing a simple test on a Web page.

Think of it as the difference between traveling within the United States, unless you’re on a wanted list, the odds are nobody will stop you, and traveling overseas, where you may not necessarily clear passport control. Challenge-response is the “your papers, please” approach to mail reception.

But it works. Spam sent from throwaway or bogus return addresses automatically disappears into the challenge-response trap, since there’s no return address to answer the “prove you’re human” challenge. Even if an actual person sent out the junk mail, only an exceptionally dedicated spammer would fill out a separate challenge-response form for every recipient.

Human senders who authenticate themselves, however, see their messages go through as before.

We tested the offerings of two of the best-known challenge-response systems, and found many kinks left in the system, especially with user-friendliness.

Mailblocks charges $9.95 a year for its mail service, and EarthLink this month began offering challenge-response filtering to its roughly 5 million subscribers.

There were difficulties in start-up, but when sent mail from each test account to the other, both systems worked well: Mailblocks and EarthLink obligingly fired off challenge replies to these test messages.

Several things can go awry in this process. People without Web access can’t reach a challenge Web page, and blind or visually impaired senders can’t get past one.

The stickiest situations involve mail sent by automated programs to willing recipients: mailing lists and legitimate, marketing e-mail.

There have never been any easy cures for spam, and challenge-response isn’t going to be one, either.

Most anti-spam programs take the form of add-ons to your normal e-mail program or service. And most rely on filtering, the effort to guess, usually imperfectly, which e-mails you receive are spam and which are legitimate.

But I’ve been testing an anti-spam system that takes a better approach. It’s a complete e-mail service that has anti-spam intelligence built right in. Instead of filtering, it uses a far more effective method that stops 100 percent of mass-mailed spam.

The program is called Mailblocks, and despite a few downsides, I like it a lot. It’s aimed at consumers and small businesses, and doesn’t work with corporate e-mail. But it has lots of sophisticated features, and can consolidate all of your e-mail accounts – even AOL accounts – into a single in-box.

Mailblocks is a Web-based e-mail service, like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, that works on both Windows and Macintosh computers. But it is slicker and cleaner than Yahoo or Hotmail, with a very good, uncluttered interface that responds to commands quickly.

The service is inexpensive. A free version, which has ads, gives you 5 megabytes of message storage and a Mailblocks e-mail address. For $9.95 a year – that’s a year, not a month – you get 15 megabytes of storage, an ad-free screen, a Mailblocks e-mail address and the power to consolidate other e-mail accounts. For $24.95 a year, you get all of that and 100 megabytes of storage. On Hotmail or Yahoo, 100 megabytes of storage costs more than twice as much, and you get less effective spam protection and have to look at ads.

Mailblocks also allows you to send e-mail attachments of up to 6 megabytes each, a generous limit that’s enough for multiple high-resolution photos. And if you don’t like having the clumsy word “mailblocks.com” in your e-mail address, you can choose from 19 alternatives.

You can divert e-mail from up to 10 of your current e-mail accounts to Mailblocks, and Mailblocks will apply its antispam system to all, including popular services like EarthLink, AOL, MSN, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. You can also import address books from other programs.

Mailblocks uses a spam-control system called challenge/response. It’s designed to stop all e-mail from the automated mass-mailing programs spammers use, while letting in e-mail from humans. Here’s how it works.

All e-mail you receive from people in your address book is passed directly to your Mailblocks in-box. If any are sent to you from addresses not in your address book, they are met by an automatically generated “challenge” e-mail that asks the sender to copy a randomly generated number into a box. These e-mails go into a special Pending folder while awaiting a response.

If the sender copies the number correctly, the e-mail is moved to your in-box, and the address is added to your address book. Mailblocks will also add the sender to a master list, so he or she will never be challenged again.

If the sender doesn’t respond correctly to the challenge within 14 days, the e-mail will be deleted from the Pending folder.

All automated spam systems will fail this test, either because they can’t copy the number, or because they use false return addresses. Only human senders with genuine return addresses can pass the challenge.

Walter Mossberg writes about personal technology for The Wall Street Journal. Copies of his columns are available at http://ptech.wsj.com.

These faxes are scams! The invoice format is designed to capture attention from the recipient, who in turn thinks they must submit payment for the service. The fine print on the “invoice” reads “This is not a bill, invoice or statement of account due. You are under no obligation to make a
payment, unless you accept this offer.”

If you receive a fax from ICLS.net, you SHOULD report it to the FTC. We have reported the scam to the Federal Trade Commission through this website, it is easy, and you should do the same!

IFCC’s mission is to address fraud committed over the Internet. For victims of Internet fraud, IFCC provides a convenient and easy-to-use reporting mechanism that alerts authorities of a suspected criminal or civil violation. For law enforcement and regulatory agencies at all levels, IFCC offers a central repository for complaints related to Internet fraud, works to quantify fraud patterns, and provides timely statistical data of current fraud trends.

The website address of the Internet Fraud Complaint Center is http://www1.ifccfbi.gov/index.asp

ID theft division of the Federal Trade Commission

How can someone steal your identity? Identity theft occurs when someone uses your personal information such as your name, Social Security number, credit card number or other identifying information, without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes.

The website address of the ID theft division of the Federal Trade Commission is http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/

“If you have a specific complaint about unsolicited commercial e-mail (spam), use the form below. You can forward spam directly to the Commission at UCE@FTC.GOV without using the complaint form.”

The address of the FTC form is:
https://rn.ftc.gov/pls/dod/wsolcq$.startup?Z_ORG_CODE=PU01

or visit the FTC home page at:

http://www.ftc.gov/

The best way to communicate with your congressman is outlined by CAUCE, The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. Please review http://www.cauce.org/congress/writecongress.shtml.