I receive so many scamming emails, typically from Nigerians, soliciting a host of information details, I want to email them back something aggressive to take me off their list. My sense, however, is that ANY response may be a risk in that they of course will not cooperate but will take note that they transmitted to an email address that is actively checked and has a warm body (e.g. potential DUPE in their crooked minds) behind it.
Is that accurate? That is, don’t even respond, even if you have contacted the authorities and alerted them to the email address of the crook trying to scam you?
It becomes like swatting flies after a while and I’m just sick of it which is why I become tempted to chase these jerks, which I have done in the past with some success. I’m just curious if you have any more details on the risks that one may or may not incur by emailing back a single thing to scammers like this.
just delete, better safe than sorry.
DELETE, don’t reply
If you respond, you are correct, they will sell your “verified” address to other spammers and scammers. They got your address from spammers who sell each other addresses – “verified” addresses sell for more.
Just report them to the authorities.
PS: These “Nigerian” scams (i.e. “help me move my ill gotten money through your bank account and I’ll let you keep some of it” when the real result is your bank account gets drained) are called that because the original ones claimed to be from Nigeria. Others, like the Russian Maffia, have followed suit. They are referred to as “Nigerian Scams” wether or not they are from Nigeria.
Yes. Whenever you click on an email, it alerts the sender that it is a valid email address and more spam is likely to follow. Just delete them unopened and adjust your spam settings for you browser and/or anti-virus if you can.
yeh most of the email addreses that reply get passed on to more scammers but i get annoyed with them and reply saying i have reported your address and will with any other email that i get sent. i dont get hardly any now.
I’d say better safe than sorry.
Chances are they have this whole process automated until the point when they get a return e-mail. Unless you give them sensitive information in this first e-mail, they won’t be able to do anything with it, but you’re probably right, from that point on they’ll know that there’s someone on the other end and the solicitation probably won’t stop.
Safe bet: add a new rule to your spam folder and try and forget about it.
Trust me, I know just how annoying it get’s. My Junk Mail folder has 81 emails in it right now, just from over last weekend. And those are just the ones that got caught!!
Well, the scammers check all emails in their inbox, just like you or I would. Any responce is a potential scam. So heres the illigal responce i would suggest to such illigal activity.
Sign them up to junk mail. As much as you can.
Do a google search “sign up to newsletter” and click each on one by one and sign them up.
They will get so annoyed at going through all their mail, it does mean they wont have enough time to read it all, meaning less income, and lesser profit.
Its one attempt at attacking scammers.
Truthfully the best option is to ignore them and delete the email. If your email service has the option to report it as spam you should do so. Any other response proves its a valid address, and that means they can sell it to someone else, and once your email addy gets added to the lists of spammers its impossible to remove yourself. If your email has gotten to the point where its unusable you might want to consider changing your email address. If you can not do this, then consider using gmail as an intermediary, have the mail forwarded to a gmail account that then forwards it back to your current email. Read about a way to do this here Gmail has a very good spam blocker and it might be able to help.
Unfortunatly as i said your replying at all, has already shown that its a valid address, and thus I do recommend changing email addresses, and then trying to limit the number of thigns you sign up for.
As a future tip, I actually have a seperate gmail address that I use for only signing up for websites. If it ever has issues with spam, I can just nuke it, and not worry about my main address. Good Luck.
The scammers buy their database of email addresses from the criminal hacker gangs (usually Russian). They have absolutely no reason to take you off their list, and as you say, once you reply, they know your email address is a live one.
They usually use free webmail addresses, and change them frequently, so reporting them has no effect.
Fortunately they are very formulaic, so you can just set up your email filters to quarantine any email with the words “Nigeria”, Benin”, “Ivoire”, “million dollars” etc. etc.”
Just delete. If you can, avoid even opening them.
block the e-mail address by doing this login to your e-mail>click options>mail>block addresses>type the e-mail address or domain to block and click Add block.
I always put mine on spam alert its not safe to respond in any way to there emails.
Yup, do not reply, if you do, you’ll recive more and more..
so if you have an account from a website or something, at the bottom of the email that you recived it says (unsubscribe)
click on it, then vertify it.. and you’ll no longer recive any spam/ scam ones…
Hope it helped..