About Internet Scams

Internet fraud (scam) scheme
The most typical scam scheme I could think of are the one's already many times practised in Estonia. Sites like Hinnavaatlus, Kuldne Börs etc offer it's customers to exchange used goods for money. I have witnessed users, who did the following:

Found a product with a good price. By the idea proposed by the seller (to avoid competition) the potential buyer wired a small amount of money to the sellers account. Later they did not receive the product or it was damaged. // This type of fraud has greatly reduced over the years because of the high cooperation by site-owners to catch the scammers in cooperation with the police.

It's hard to describe a perfect scam, because the easy (and first to come to mind) focus on the stupidity of a person - eg send me money so I could send you back some more. Or they stress out a person in need (help us help a child in Valgamaa, who can't walk).

Probably it would be dumb to describe a perfect scam, because then it would be put to use (if I would be interested, I would do it myself).

In conclusion, the most effective scams will always be the one's hoping for a ill-IT-literate (n00b) user to send the scammer voluntarily some money.

There is one exception - phishing sites. With the ease of reproduction almost no website in the world is piracy proof and I do fear that some day, when typing in eg. emay.com I would get the exact-looking website, buy my product there and find out, that thanks to one spell error I know am 100 dollars poorer.

Of course HTTPS etc helps, but nothing is unbreakable. Except diamonds? But you don't put times and PC together.

Review of Scam o Rama & What's the bloody points
I read couple of scam introductions in both sites. Since they are VERY long, I took the liberty not to read the majority of them. My first question was - how do they have time to re-scam the scammers? The discussions were very long and as I could understand the Nigerians (who live in Africa, where life is gloomy), I still have great trouble understanding how a person (EU, US) can have such time to deal with them.

From the ethical side of view I see no troubles. As the main idea is to let the Nigerians "have a taste of their own medicine" and no real harm (nobody has sent the rescammers money) is being done, then it is a form of people's project (Teeme Ära etc). Although the goal is questionable since there would be no greater outcome of the project.

Well - actually there is one outcome. The sites provide an exxeceltn study material on scams and hopefully will teach future maybe-victims what to expect from a scammer.

I myself just never read e-mail not sent from my contacts.

Thoughts after Inside Echelon

Review of the article "Inside Echelon" by Duncan Campbell

The idea (or fact) that we are being watched more and more by governments, is not new. Since the Cold War (maybe even before), people have constantly felt the Big Brother looking over their shoulder.

Campbell's article reviewed the system, that is one of the greatest examples of machinery committed to the creation of that feeling. Ehcelon has greatly expanded during the last decades, which is somewhat phenomenal, because there seems to be now no apparent threat to the countries involved. I believe it is happening because of the constant technological development and the cost-reduction of a surveillance system like that.

To other countries disadvantage - the system is owned mainly by US and secondly it's allies UK and other English speaking western countries. From gathering military information during the Soviet Union existing times, the Echelon has shifted to economic information gathering from western countries and somewhat lesser military information gathering from developing countries (North-Korea, China).

Since the surveillance system is being more and more automated, it is apparent, that from any day now, nothing will be private, since now the chance of you "missing the bot or the listener" will soon be eliminated.

Thoughts on the situation? I follow a somewhat simple code in my life. "Have no privacy". That means, that no one could shock me with their knowledge about my thoughts on some subject or events happened to me. Thus I am never worried, when hearing again ideas about governmental conspiracy. So I will not be stressing typical worries about individual right to privacy, because that's vanity. Thinking that you, a 75 year old incident to happen in this planet, are worth longtime tracing, is in my opinion short-sighted.

The problem however is big in the industrial spying between (or toward) different countries. How could we, Estonians, expect to really invent something world-beneficiary (Nokia), if big countries have surveillance systems like these. From the moment, some talented student or programmer in Tallinn writes down in digital form his or her great idea and shares it, basically it would be possible that the next day a group of IBM scientist are working on it, thanks to the information discovered and then shared by NSA, that for the greater glory of their country.

The way I see it, there is no point seeing us being anything greater than a country with nice islands to visit in summers, because never will we have such military potential to defent our economy (defending our country is somewhat questionable by certain people in Estonia) from systems like Echelon. That is of course saddening.