Everyone probably gets these emails telling you that you have a long lost uncle who was an official in Africa who left you $21 million, and if you’d just send $1,000 to them then they will wire you the money. They are called 419 scams. About once a year I also get an airmail letter from Africa with one of these scams, trying to get me to send them information for them. For the last four years I have also been getting phone calls to my office from these clowns, trying to get me to yield to temptation and help them steal from me. This last week I got three of these calls, all from country code 233 indicating Ghana. It’s getting more and more annoying (though perhaps the solution is simply to disconnect my phone).
If you try to shop on craigslist, you regularly come across semi-obvious scams, and there are even more scams that are fairly well concealed. I am now getting several spammers a day following me on twitter, and my spam folder on my personal email account typically has 5,000 spam messages in it (I never look at them).
All of this is a reminder that a lot of people on this planet try to make their living from fraud and other criminal activities. Technology has become an enabler for these scams, and the most chilling offender in my mind is voice over IP, which makes phone calls from countries like Ghana essentially free. People who are naive or lonely or otherwise vulnerable (particularly senior citizens) are going to fall victims to this criminality. It used to be that if you wanted to avoid crime, you could mostly do this by sequestering yourself in a civil part of the world. The Internet is making that more difficult.