"There's a sucker born every minute." - P.T. Barnum

Spammers spam because suckers fall for it. But anyone can be a sucker - even a respectable family.

The following is a link to an article in The Hamilton Spectator, all about the end result of a family who got caught up in an e-mail scam.

http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1153345817590

You'd think by now that we've heard and seen everything. "Been there, done that", isn't that the famous expression?

Yet SOMEBODY is buying all the snake oil, get-rich-quick, help-the-needy and all the other scams out there.

The answer of course is twofold - education and spam filtering.

Every now and then, I'll post new resources to help out with the education part - like this one - to show that the dangers are real. In the story above, a mother of 3 shot her husband and she is now in jail after the strain of arguing became too much for her. The arguing resulted mainly from the money she lost in a common scam. What of her children? Surely they don't deserve this!

People often think "it couldn't happen to ME". Yet anybody can be fooled.

From an intervention standpoint, be sure your anti-spam systems are up to date and finely tuned. Spammers are always going to be out there because, quite frankly, crime pays. So when we build great systems, they find ways around them. Then we improve our systems again, and the cycle continues.

An outdated anti-spam system is almost as bad as no system at all, so be sure to stay current!

In addition, be sure that there are good e-mail policies in place, such as "when in doubt, don't open it", "don't forward", "no e-mail jokes" etc.

We always hate to see stories of the tremendous pain on the victims of crime. That's why we as professionals should do our utmost to help prevent these spam scams from spreading in the first place.

Thanks to Mitch Lauer for bringing this to my attention.