chain letters & fraud (spam)

[P3D Bob Wier <wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From time to time, I post a note regarding chain/spam letters to the
mailing lists.

For people new to the internet, from time to time you may receive
unsolicited mail regarding various shady offers of things for sale
from various groups/companies. Almost all of these will involve mail
fraud or violations on chain letter rules here in the USA (particularly
if a response requires either telephone or snail mail contact). Most
people can recognize these as not being legitimate and will delete them
as soon as they are received (although they are a huge problem - 
"spam" mail volume is up 46% in the last month alone). Since there
are some people still paying on a per-minute basis for a connection
to the net, "junk e-mail" costs them money to download and read it,
and is just generally not a good idea.

However

Occasionally there are also chain letters/solicitations which APPEAR
to be non-commercial in nature, and well meaning folk pass them along
as a civil gesture. Note that virtually all legitimate charitable
orgnizations have abandonded internet fund raising since it "puts them
in bed" with so many con artists.

The reason that I bring this up now is that a new spam appears to be
underway under the name of a "Tickle me Elmo" letter sponsored by
the American Cancer Society. As best can be determined, this is bogus
and may actually be a fraud attempt. PLEASE DO NOT forward it or 
anything similar to the mailing list without checking first with
the system administrator.

THANKS  -- Bob Wier

     mailto:wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
    01:35 PM Saturday, April 5, 1997
     Texas A & M University - Commerce
 keeper of the Photo-3d,  Overland-Trails
ICOM radio and LDS State Research Outline Guides
      "Heisenberg may have slept here. . ." 



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