This computer consulting business of mine gives me a lot of personal satisfaction. I get to meet nice people, and to help them fix their computer problems or use their computers better. I also get to play with lots of computer toys, but that is a more personal issue!
But there are times I just have to grin and bear it. The times when people lose critical data because of a PC failure and have no backups. The times when a business is dead in the water because they didn't plan for emergencies. The times when people seem to believe anything they read on the Internet or in e-mail. The amount I charge to consult is far less than the cost of a PC, than the cost of repairs, then the cost of restoring data rather than protecting it in the first place. But, I just sigh and go on.
Another area of aggravation is how gullible people are with respect to all the scams out there, and how little they protect their critical personal information. Identity theft is an active problem, and so few people seem to be aware of it.
Recently, a reader of the State Port Pilot received an e-mail that asked her to enter lots of personal information. The e-mail purported to be from an online service that she uses and it said it would lock out her account if she didn't reply. Luckily, she asked first before leaping, because this was a known identity theft scam. The data actually would be sent to a computer in Russia and who knows what uses it would have been put to.
In this case, the e-mail had a pointer to what looked like a legitimate website, where there was a form asking for the information. The form looked professional. Some times these websites will actually have a link to a real website for the vendor that they are imitating. Why not have a link to AOL's privacy policy webpage? Nobody reads it anyway!
There are two ways for me to approach helping you with this problem. The first way is to use the direct and simple approach. It's easy. Delete and ignore everything! Seriously! Any e-mail business offer you receive, any get rich quick scheme, anything asking you for information, any virus alert is a fake. Period. End of sentence. Delete them without reading and don't look back. No legitimate company that you deal with will do business that way. If your bank, or AOL, or PayPal, or any legitimate service wants to contact you for your critical personal data, they will do it in another way.
At the very worst, if you erase a legitimate e-mail, they will contact you again. And even if the e-mail is valid and they are really going to disable your account (or something similar) - so what? If there is such a misunderstanding, you should be able to quickly get it fixed. Nothing, repeat nothing, is worth the exposure of your critical personal data. If you answer the e-mail, you are taking lots of risk; the risk of something actually going wrong if you don't answer is very slight. And if the e-mail is in fact for real, ask yourself if you want to deal in the future with a company that has so little regard for your privacy.
OK, now the longer version. You are obviously one of those people that are totally paranoid. You can't stand to delete an e-mail without reading it, and you constantly worry that it might be for real. So, how do you spot bogus e-mail?
1) Legitimate business e-mail usually doesn't have what looks like a real person's name as the sender, or some generic department such as "Customer Relations". The senders should identify themselves more specifically.
2) If the subject of the e-mail has strange, junk characters in it, it's a scam. Those random seeming letters will identify you in some way if you reply. So, if you receive an e-mail with the subject "Import Mail For Bob skdys 234 sdkx", throw it away immediately.
3) Never ever give our your Social Security number. Period. In any case.
4) If the e-mail sounds like it is personal to you, but goes to a distribution list of names, throw it away.
5) If the e-mail takes you to a website that has just an IP address number (like http://123.100.200.10), it's a fake. Legitimate websites have regular domain names, not numbers.
I am sure that there are lots more rules to identify scam e-mail, but my original rule is the best - throw it all away unless the e-mail comes from someone you know, or was expected in some way.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com)