Phishermen have no shame...

[seawasp]

... Got a spam/Phish message purporting to be from the CDC and asking me to create a "personal vaccination profile" for use in controlling H1N1 spread.

I really wonder how anyone can fall for these things; it's asking for stuff that the Constitution would forbid the government from doing, and all you have to do is mouseover the link to see that it's not going to the CDC, but to some server in another country.

Comments

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

Well, what the Constitution says has never stopped the government yet. :/ But I agree, it's ridiculous. Still, people will do it.

[seawasp]

Oh, it's stopped the government MANY times. Otherwise you'd never have heard about any protests of the things they've wanted to do, and been stopped from doing.

There's other governments out there that show what they're like if they don't actually have a constitution that stops them. Ours, for all its flaws and even in its worst moments, is nothing even close to those.

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't have said "never." I'm certainly not denigrating our Constitution or the lawmakers who respect it, and this government is probably the best out there. All I meant is that the government has blithely ignored and/or twisted the Constitution on many, many occasions.

I am curious about what information the Constitution forbids the government to gather; I can't recall a a similar provision. It's been a long time since I looked at it, though.

[seawasp]

It derives from a number of freedoms in the Bill of Rights, such as "unreasonable search and seizure". When much of your life is dependent on and controlled by information, the government's right to get that information and use it is heavily restricted. It needs REASONS to do so, and beyond a certain point it has to go through quite some work to justify those reasons.

There's also a difference between a *request* for information, which you may freely refuse with no penalty, and a *demand* for information, which you must respond to or be penalized in some way. The phishing message, for instance, stated that you MUST create a profile on their phony system.

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

Huh, I never would've thought that applied; but I see a case could be made for it.

[murstein.livejournal.com]

Despite a decade's attempts, reading URLs and the mouseover trick is beyond my mother's technical abilities. Not everyone this is true of is in their 70s, although this gives me some insight as to why some folks have trouble with the idea.

[randallsquared.livejournal.com]

"I really wonder how anyone can fall for these things; it's asking for stuff that the Constitution would forbid the government from doing"

Er, this was humor, right? I mean, given that the vast majority of what the government does is similarly forbidden by a non-tortured reading of the Constitution...

[seawasp]

I suspect the vast majority is quite constitutional. The nonconstitutional stuff is more noisy though.

[zanzjan.livejournal.com]

As sad as it is, I suspect that if a scam email went out to my users that said, "Hi, I am a scammer. Please reply to this email with your credit card and bank account information, date of birth, social security number, and mother's maiden name so that I may steal your identity and take all your money. KTHXBYE --Thief", I'd have at least a couple of users that'd fall for it.

[pedanther]

According to that reliable source, I Once Read It Somewhere On The Internet, somebody once did a study where they equipped a web site with a sidebar ad saying something like "Click here to infect your computer with a virus!", and a disturbing number of people clicked on it.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I remember reading that back in the pre-internet days, you could put a classified ad in the paper that said, in its entirety, "Send $5 to PO Box X now!" and a surprising number of people would.

[kengr]

"Last chance to send $5" was how I heard it. And apparently the Post Office had to rewrite their regs to make it count as mail fraud...

[kayshapero]

When I first heard of it (as a kid) it was $1. Old scam this one. And I still don't understand how it works, but manifestly...

[kengr]

It works because some people only ever read tiny bits of what they look at. In this case "last chance" and $x.

So they automatically "fill in" what they'd expect to be around such, and act accordingly.

Think back to school or other places where everyone *had* to read sections of text aloud. How many folks were rather obviously only seeing keywords and "filling in" the rest according to what they *expected* it to say, and then stumbling when the next bit they actually *looked* at didn't match what they expected?

[seawasp]

Hm. When I heard people asked to read things aloud, the problem wasn't that they'd have problems from filling in; it was that they read like robots, exactly what was on the page. They didn't think about it. They didn't invest any actual emotion or understanding into it. They might as well have been my old ATARI with the word-pronouncing program.

[muirecan.livejournal.com]

This sounds like the test a store was talking into trying. They ran a hard times sale. Everything marked up 25%. According to the story very few people caught or commented on the fact that prices where marked up.

[kengr]

My experience is that while a lot of folks do the read it like a robot" bit, a lot do anything *but* read what is on the page. At the very least, you get folks changing the phrasing to the way they'd say it. But you also get folks who "re-interpret" it even more than that.

It's something that always puzzled me, as early as third grade (back in the early 60s). I'd wonder how they could *possibly* be reading "that" when it wasn't what was on the page.

And as I recall, there are studies that show that people, especially if they are "skimming" *don't* actually read the page. They look for key words and phrases. And mostly ignore the surrounding text.

[kayshapero]

Certainly the ones doing customer support tend to do that - it can be tricky avoiding inclusion of key words that send them blithely off in the wrong direction... Sometimes I think I'm talking to the old Eliza psychiatrist program...

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

Well, much as I detest the word 'sheeple' there are a disturbing number of people who seem to endevor to be such.

I seem to recall hearing that the ads for, "Make money at home with easy home business, send $5 for details," would result in a single sheet of directions that would say, "Take out classified ads saying 'Make money at home...' and upon receiving money send a copy of these directions."

Arguably it is 'easy', not a chain letter/pyramid scheme since you don't send money upstream, and I suspect probably banned under postal regulations anyway.

[seawasp]

As I heard it, it was simply "Send your dollar today!" -- which was a version of a common tagline on various appeals for money at the time. This one simply omitted the detailed appeal to your charitable sensibilities and asked for the money directly.

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

I heard about a case back in the mid-late 90s, where a person did a web site in which they said something to the effect of, "I am $X in debt. I wasn't cheated, it's a combination of $X in student loans and Y x $X from not paying attention to how I was using my credit cards. Yes, it's my own fault but I want to be debt free. I have figured out it will take X years to pay this off on my own. If you would be willing to offer a $5 gift I promise it will go directly to paying down my debts." With a paypal button at the bottom for paying $5. As I recall they paid off the debt in a bit over a year.

I also recall hearing that the copycat sites didn't do as well, with the theory being that the first person to do so got a, "Oh why not, they aren't really begging and at least they're honest about it," while after that people saw the others as greedy copycats just looking for the money. Although with many more people online now, there might not be as big a problem with that.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I remember some years ago a kid wanted to go to college but didn't have the money for it, so he wrote a letter to <well-known national columnist> asking if WKNC could write about him (the kid) in his column and ask readers to send in $1 towards his college education. He got easily enough money to go to college with.

All the other kids who subsequently tried to work the same thing got squat. In many instances, it pays to be the first person to think of something.

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

Or to do easy but time consuming work. I read about a girl who was able to go to college effectively for free. She did it by starting early in her sophomore year, obtaining one of those books that lists groups who offer scholarships preparing packets for every source listed in the book. By every source I mean every one, from front cover to back whether or not she appeared to meet their requirements.

The two key elements:
*By starting preparations in her Sophomore year she was able to spread the work out ever enough time that it didn't interfere with her life, while still preparing thousands of applications.
*Depending on how the funds are set up, they may be required to pay out a certain amount each year, so if there is money left over after the fully qualifying candidates they will start looking at anyone else that applied.

So two years later when she graduated from high school she found that she had enough offers from people giving grants that she didn't need to take out even one loan.

Seems to me there are many things in life where we short ourselves by looking only at the total work/time involved and not stopping to ask, "But if I go one step at a time, how easy is each individual step? Hey, that isn't so bad, is it?"