My solution to spammers includes steam flying machines, a pride of anime hentai cat-girls with big guns, an assortment of space pirates (with and without motor scooters and electric guitars), and, just to make sure, a duo of Trouble Consultants with instructions to be careful.

(If I'm going to have wild fantasies, they might as well be fun ones.)

Shit, Dave, I've just realized that your spammer solution would fit perfectly in my next-but-one SF novel (the Iron Sunrise sequel). Now I just need to find a spammer.

Here is a science-fiction story about a hitman who kills spammers:
http://neometropolis.com/hakker.html

Of course, I don't support the *COUGH*w*nd*rf*l*COUGH* idea that spammers whould be killed...
;)

And I thought that I had a warped imagination.

Just a thought. Spammers are motivated by money (if they just wanted to work for the CIA or whatever the KGB is called these days [Al Quaida?] they would design viruses) that they keep on keeping on leads to a logical conclusion.
Out there, people are buying generic viagra, homeopathic viagra, degrees from colleges in Athens, Georgia and signing up to be policemen (because Homeland Security is everybody's busness, especially those of us who don't live in the USA)
Myself, I'd have thought such people were too dumb to live, but I may be wrong. Maybe evolution doesn't work any more.

And maybe they simply don't believe in evolution.

Note to Great Inventor: do not attempt to give away the secrer of Cold Fusion or Antigravity by mass email.

(At this point it starts to be difficult to distinguish The Count of Monte Cristo from The Stars My Destination)

Your memo is priceless. Hate to say it, but it (and some of the poems at Making Light which recast Nigerian spam as verse) indirectly give a "redeeming social value" to spam (to use the famous American legal phrase from pr0n precedent).

Writers fight back, in part, by getting as much bandwidth as they can for their own work. Here's an interesting example from Oz: "Technically, CliveJames.com is a multimedia Web site, divided into four sections: text, audio, gallery, and video. According to Mr. James, it is the first such Web site to be created by any writer in the world."

I was using Mozdex recently with no ads it seems but they seem like all the rest as I think they are looking to place ads on the site which do abuse your privacy.
Looks like their trying to milk linux too:
http://www.libervis.com/modules/wordpress/?p=15
http://www.mozdex.com/

Sounds phony.

if they just wanted to work for the CIA or whatever the KGB is called these days [Al Quaida?] they would design viruses

I'm pretty sure that all of the CIA, KGB and Al Qu'aeda would draw the line at spamming. I mean, even the evillest of evil bastards have some limits.

The problem is compounded by the dumbass braindead behaviour of real bank security, when they _do_ phone you up to tell you someone has nicked your card details. A few months ago, the Co-Op phoned me, and asked me to give them my bank account number in order to confirm my identity. I told them to fuck off, put the phone down, then rang the Co-Op's main customer number - the one on my statements - and was able to find out that there was a kosher flag on my file. All was sorted out. But really.

Maybe the caller did not know you banked with Barclays, but was just hoping to score. A lot of people would just give the requested info, and then wonder why a bank was calling that wasn't even their bank.

Maybe the caller did not know you banked with Barclays, but was just hoping to score.

Very unlikely. Barclays have just three branches in the whole of Scotland, and don't really do current account banking up here -- I'm still with them because they're a lot more pervasive down in England, and I kept the account when I moved.

The more I think about this, the more uneasy I get. It looks like a highly targeted ID theft operation, just filling in the missing bits of info they can't get from a dumpster. Police report coming on.

Edited by author 03-06-2006 11:10 PM
I live in the US, and the exact same thing happend to me with the Discover card three months ago. The call started with "a new card is on its way, and we're raising your credit limit" and then it went on "but can we verify your mother's maiden name and your social security number?". At which point I knew enough and hung up. (What warned me immdiately is the raised credit limit. Mine is awfully high and I've never used more than 30% of it.)

These scammers had one extra thing going for them though: they faked their caller ID (simple with VOIP) and made it look like the company's real phone number.

I ended up calling Discover, explaining the story (and they confirmed they'd never place a call like that), and putting a fraud watch on this card. The scammers called back twice more.

I use this credit card mostly for on-line purchases, so I guess somebody must have gotten the a list of names and CC numbers from a hacked system somewhere, and staretd a call center...

That 0800 number is allocated by OFCOM to BT, which strikes me as odd. I would expect fraudsters to be using one of the many smaller telcos.

Michael, that assumes the caller gave out an 0800 number associated with their scam. More likely, at the first sign of suspicion on my part, they just rattled off a random number and crossed me off their list. (If you've got any sense and you're running one of these scams, you don't give a valid callback number to a target who is suspicious.)

I've bought quite a lot of stuff over the web in the past eight or nine years. It's probably time to reset my bank account and credit cards (and also lock down so that only one credit card is used online and the other one is only used for cardholder-present transactions).

Charlie, I have one credit card with a very low limit (about $450 US) that I use exclusively for on-line sites that I haven't dealt with before and may not be reputable (e.g. buying a bootleg from Russia). I call that my sacrificial goat card - if that gets abused and maxed out it won't really harm me.

Anyway, my point is you want *two* on-line credit cards - the sacrificial goat and one to deal with known entities (large bookstore orders and whatever).